Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub

With the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub's jumbo capacity, you can fit scads of games, movies, and other material on it. While you may want to load and run the latest, hottest games off a faster SSD, the FireCuda Gaming Hub ($219.99 for 8TB; $399.99 for 16TB as tested) is a great desk addition for backing up and archiving your collection. You can keep a game mega-library on board. With the 16TB version, you should be able to store up to several hundred AAA titles, as well as assorted movies and other content. It's more of a classic desktop external hard drive than a gaming centerpiece—it could use some more physical ports to bulk up the "Hub" part of its resume—but look at it as a bottomless box for your bytes with some connectivity benefits.

Spinning Up Near-Endless Storage

The FireCuda Gaming Hub is a desktop-style hard drive in an external enclosure, measuring 1.9 by 5 by 8.1 inches and weighing 2.7 pounds. Within the frame is a 3.5-inch hard drive that spins at 7,200rpm. The drive is powered by an included wall-wart style adapter.

The FireCuda Hub rests on four tiny rubber feet, however you orient it. One set of feet is on the wide, flat bottom, while another set is on one long edge, so you can stand the drive on its side while running it or lay it down.

As a hub, the FireCuda is rather basic. In back, next to the power jack, is the main connector for system direct-attachment: a USB Micro-B port. A USB Micro-B-to-A cable is included.

On the front are USB Type-C and USB Type-A ports, to which you can attach peripherals...

We'd have liked to see at least one more USB Type-A port. If you intend to connect a keyboard and mouse through the Gaming Hub, both will likely have USB Type-A connectors. And if both are connected, you'd want a third port, at least, for jacking in the occasional USB flash drive or external SSD.

The FireCuda Gaming Hub comes in two capacities, the $219.99 8TB and $399.99 16TB models cited earlier. This works out to about 2.8 cents per gigabyte for the 8TB version and a mere 2.5 cents per gigabyte for the 16TB one. That's about a fourth of the cost per gig of the cheapest external SSDs.

Tools and Twinkling Lights

For software, you can (and should) download the Seagate Toolkit—there are versions for both Windows and macOS—once you register the drive. Functions include backup, restore, and sync/mirror, plus controls for one of the Hub's niftiest features: the on-chassis RGB LED lighting.

By default, when you plug the drive in and attach it to a computer, the lighting will pulse red. From the RGB tab in the Toolkit, you can change the color (to a fixed color or a rainbow flow), and alter the lighting pattern's behavior (to static, breathe, blink, or slide actions).

Alternately, if you happen to own a Razer PC or a piece of lighting-enabled Razer gaming gear, you could use the company's Chroma light-syncing tech to control the lighting, by downloading the Razer Synapse hardware configuration utility. Even when using the basic lighting-control functions in the Toolkit, though, I found the display versatile and captivating.

Testing the FireCuda Gaming Hub: No Slouch for a Platter Drive

The FireCuda Gaming Hub’s results on our external-drive benchmark tests show that it performs as expected for a recent 7,200rpm hard drive. (Seagate does not publish read and write speed ratings for the drive.)

Its sequential read and write speeds, as measured by the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 test, are 268MBps and 255MBps, respectively. The read and write speeds measured by the Mac-based BlackMagic Disk Speed test are very similar—233MBps and 255MBps. We mapped the FireCuda drive out below against a host of other, portable platter hard drives we have tested in the last couple of years. (We haven't seen any desktop external drives with a single 3.5-inch mechanism of late for direct comparison.)

As you can see, these numbers are considerably faster than those of 5,400rpm-rated portable (not desktop 3.5-inch) hard drives such as the WD My Passport 5TB and the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch 2TB shown in our table. The FireCuda Gaming Hub’s speeds are still shy, though, of the very lowest-end external SSDs and no match for current USB 3.2 Gen 2 external SSDs. (See how we test hard drives.)

The PCMark 10 storage benchmark measures how fast a drive is at performing certain everyday tasks, including program loading. The FireCuda Gaming Hub’s score of 537 is lower than the scores for most lower-end external SSDs. (Most of our hard-drive comparison products were tested using a previous PCMark version, whose scores are not directly comparable with PCMark 10, so their scores do not appear in our chart.) From this, we can surmise that the FireCuda Gaming Hub is best for game backup and storage, and less ideal for loading and running newer, graphically intensive AAA games.

A Drive for Game and Movie Backup

Although the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub is fast for a spinning external hard drive, thanks to its 7,200rpm platters, it is plodding compared with most external SSDs. No platter drive can really compete with a current SSD for copying and loading recent high-impact AAA games rife with graphical content. It's also the bare minimum, feature-wise, as a hub, due to its limited range of connectors. A true hub might gain you display capabilities and act as a connect/disconnect point for, say, a gaming laptop. This design is more basic than that.

However, the FireCuda Gaming Hub's immense capacity makes it ideal for game storage and backup if you hoard hundreds of games. Most gamers should be able to store their entire collection on the Gaming Hub, with plenty of room left over for movies, other media, and most any other files they might want to store. (Just know that anything unique on the drive, such as family photos, needs a second copy stashed somewhere for safety; drives do die.) And it fits in with any gaming setup with its cool RGB lighting.