Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub 16TB Review

TweakTown's Rating: 90%

The Bottom Line

Gamers wanting increased capacity for their massive library should look at the Firecuda Gaming Hub!

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With Seagate outing Firecuda as its PC Gaming brand, they have released an entire lineup of products to handle any and every need a consumer would have; at the top, the 530 NVMe is one of the quickest SSDs on the market, while high capacity hard drives are being used in products like the Firecuda Gaming Dock and today's FireCuda Gaming Hub.

With two capacities at launch, the Gaming Hub aims to increase overall capacity with 8 and 16TB models while offering passthrough USB 3.2 for additional devices. For this article, we are focusing on the 16TB model, which with past experience, should provide a modest 250MB/s read and write, though Seagate does not officially give a performance spec on this drive.

MSRP of the 16TB FireCuda Gaming Hub comes in at $399.99 with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging for the FireCuda Gaming HDD follows the black and orange colorway of past solutions. Capacity is listed top right at 16TB.

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The back includes marketing information for the drive, including support for Razer Chroma.

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Included with the FireCuda Gaming Hub, we find stickers, USB 3.2 cable, and a power adapter.

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The enclosure follows the squared edge design of both the Dock and Portable HDD from earlier in the year. The front offers both a USB-A and C port with an RGB underglow we will see in later images.

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The back of the drive offers the power input and micro-B USB 3.2 connection.

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Powering up the drive, we get a look at the RGB lighting across the front of the drive.

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Toolkit from Seagate allows you to set up and manage backups with the Game Drive. RGB options can be found at the bottom; this is also where you will enable Razer Chroma extension if you intend to use that functionality.

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Once you enable Chroma in Toolkit, you will need the Chroma Connect add-on for Synapse 3.0. From there, you can customize RGB on the drive itself.

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I fired up CDI to get an idea of what drives Seagate is using internally without opening up the enclosure. For the 16TB model, we have a Seagate Exos platform.

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To get an idea of the performance of the drive, I ran through a few passes of CDM. The performance came in at 256 MB/s reads, and 183 MB/s write.

The Firecuda Gaming Hub is a fantastic option for gamers that would instead archive their gaming library locally than have it waiting for them on the cloud. The drive's aesthetics can fit in quite easily with any modern desktop setup, and the customizable RGB offers support for Razer Chroma. Capacity options at 8TB and 16TB give plenty of additional storage and double the capacity of the Firecuda Gaming Dock while coming in with a lower MSRP.

The Firecuda Gaming Hubs performance is quick enough to allow for games to be quickly migrated to NVMe storage for fast load times or even played directly from the drive for those that don't mind that extra few seconds.

Overall a solid option for those needing mass capacity in a well-designed and aesthetically attractive enclosure.

TweakTown External Storage Test System

• System: XPG Xenia Xe
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)