Seagate Launches FireCuda Forge Hybrid Storage Drive

Seagate’s FireCuda Forge pairs a high-capacity hard drive with an M.2 NVMe solid-state drive, which buyers must provide separately. The system is available through Seagate’s online store in 8TB and 20TB hard-drive configurations priced at $699 and $899. Both hard drives can be replaced by users.

The Forge is the first product to use Seagate’s Alkemi platform. The company says the software uses machine learning to shift files between the hard drive and SSD according to users’ workloads and which data they access most. The two storage devices appear to the computer as a single drive.

The SSD must be an M.2 2280 NVMe model using PCIe Gen 3 or later, with a maximum capacity of 1TB. Seagate specifies minimum SSD speeds of 2,400MB/s for reading and 2,000MB/s for writing, and recommends a model with DRAM cache. The SSD’s separate cost adds to the listed prices.

Seagate says the combined system can reach read speeds of 2,500MB/s and write speeds of 2,000MB/s. It connects over USB4 and requires Windows 11 or macOS 26 or later. The Forge’s approach differs from a setup that simply caches frequently used files on flash storage: Seagate says Alkemi actively reorganizes data between the two drives as usage changes.