Solid-state drives are all well and good — they’re bloody fast — but if you want a decent amount of storage capacity, you’re going to be paying through the nose. Seagate has two new mobile hard drives that you can install into any 2.5-inch laptop bay — one of them is the world’s fastest, thinnest and lightest 2TB drive, while the other has a ridiculous five terabytes of space.
The 2TB FireCuda is “the fastest, thinnest and lightest 2TB hard rive on the market today” according to Seagate, and fulfils that claim thanks to 8GB of onboard NAND flash memory and smart caching tech — so it’s a hybrid drive, then — that uses a new algorithm that is apparently smarter than ever at working out what data you access regularly. We’re generally sceptical of these things, but we’ve seen it work to good effect in real-world situations in the past even if benchmarks tend to overstate its usefulness.
Seagates the tech behind the FireCuda’s 8GB of flash “multi-tier caching”, and as well as working out what data you’re going to access and offloading it to the temporary storage cache for faster access, that means the mechanical drive platter can spin down and save you a bit of battery power at the same time. The FireCuda — from 500GB to 2TB disk sizes — has a five-year warranty as standard, and although the 2TB isn’t in any stores yet it should be reasonably priced with the 1TB version setting you back about $120.
But if you need even more storage, Seagate also has you sorted there with a new BarraCuda 5TB drive. It’s a 15mm thick drive rather than the skinny 7mm form factor, so you’ll need either a relatively thick and capacious laptop or an external drive enclosure to fit it in. That’s the price you pay for what is a serious amount of storage capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor, although, again, we don’t know what that price is just yet. [Seagate]