Seagate's new hybrid drive raises some old questions

Seagate doesn’t think hybrid drives are done just yet. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the new FireCuda Forge line of storage drives. The new drives combine the high capacity of a traditional plattered HDD with the speed and responsiveness of a user-supplied solid-state drive (SSD). The new hybrid storage solution is Seagate’s first to be powered and managed by the new Alkemi intelligent storage platform.

The FireCuda Forge is available right now through Seagate’s web store, and comes in 8TB ($699) or 20TB ($899) HDD configurations—neither of which includes the required SSD. Users will have to bring their own SSD, with some specific restrictions. The FireCuda Forge is compatible with M.2 2280 NVMe drives that are PCIe Gen3 or higher. The maximum supported NVMe capacity is 1TB, which means that’s as much data as you’ll be able to dedicate to storage on the “fast side” of the hybrid setup. The NVMe will require minimum speeds of 2,400MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write, and a unit with DRAM cache is recommended. Seagate claims 2,500MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write speeds for the combined system, along with USB4 and support for Windows 11 and macOS 26+.

After dipping to historical lows earlier in the decade, storage pricing per TB has exploded amid the AI boom. According to data collected by Tom’s Hardware, some solid-state drives now cost two to three times their historic lows, and it’s not just SSDs. Mechanical drives haven’t been immune either. According to PCServerParts, a Seagate Exos 24TB drive that sold for $298.99 in the summer of 2025 was priced at $699.99 by August 2026.