The Seagate FireCuda is a 2.5-inch laptop hard drive that incorporates a solid-state drive with a mechanical (spinny) hard drive in one small package.

I filled up the 450GB hard drive on my HP ProBook G650, so it was time to buy a larger drive. I was originally looking for a standard HDD with a 7,200 RPM rating when I ran across a 2 TB hybrid drive at Micro Center in Denver. For only $99 I could have a fast drive with a lot of legroom to fill up with useless crap.

I picked up a hardware USB 3.0 hard drive cloning tool since it was on sale. I was able to clone my HP's 450GB drive over to the new FireCuda in an hour. I converted the drive to Dynamic (I use Windows) and extended the volume. It all worked like a charm, and now NovelFactory, the machine I write most of my work on, is far snappier and has a lot of space for me to fill with manuscripts. 

Overall, the FireCuda is running four to five times as fast. Tweaking book covers in Photoshop takes notably less time to render. The 2TB drive is the largest one the store carried, but I may end up swapping out the 5,400 RPM mechanical drives in my dedicated email laptop just to proactively get the hard drive replaced. 

The FireCuda comes with a five year warranty. I'm hoping I never have to worry about it, but I'm making network drive snapshots just in case.

Iron Noder 2017

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