Seagate this week announced two new portable solid-state storage solutions aimed at gamers and those who need fast storage on the go. The company also unveiled an enterprise-focused storage system for managing data at the “Edge” of the Cloud.
FireCuda Gaming SSD
Similar to the Samsung X5, the FireCuda Gaming SSD is an NVMe-based portable USB 3.2 SSD with advertised speeds up to 2,000 MB/s. Its small metal enclosure offers RGB lighting that can be customized with the Seagate Toolkit software and synchronized with the previously announced FireCuda Gaming Dock.
Packing Seagate’s own FireCuda 510 SSD, the FireCuda Gaming SSD will be available in March in capacities of 500GB ($189.99), 1TB ($259.99), and 2TB ($499.99). It includes Seagate’s five-year limited warranty.
BarraCuda Fast SSD
The new Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD is a slightly larger SATA-based portable SSD. As a SATA device, it offers maximum speeds of up to 540 MB/s via its USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port.
The device comes exFAT formatted out of the box for cross-platform compatibility and includes Seagate’s Toolkit software for backup and syncing. As a product marketed to creative professionals, the drive also includes a two-month subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan (Lightroom and Photoshop).
The BarraCuda Fast SSD will be available in February in capacities of 500GB ($94.99), 1TB ($169.99), and 2TB ($299.99).
Lyve Drive
Seagate also used CES to announce a new enterprise-targeted initiative, the Lyve Drive Mobile System. Built “for the Datasphere,” Seagate’s Lyve Drive is a series of robust portable devices aimed to help enterprise and cloud businesses collect, transport, analyze, and secure the large amount of data being generated at the “edge” of the modern cloud infrastructure. Examples may include collecting data from autonomous vehicle training or ingesting, backing up, and editing 4K and 8K video on location.
Five devices will be available for the Lyve Drive Mobile System initially:
Lyve Drive Cards and Card Reader: High capacity, high-performance 1TB CFexpress cards and a portable card reader for ingesting endpoint data sources.
Lyve Drive Shuttle: An autonomous data storage and transport solution for easy ingestion from direct-attached, network-attached, and other external storage devices, with up to 16TB of capacity depending on HDD or SSD configuration, and an e-ink touchscreen display to copy files directly without a PC.
Lyve Drive Mobile Array: A sealed, high-performance 6-bay array that is ruggedized and easy to transport. When used with Seagate’s 18TB Exos drives, the array can support a raw capacity of up to 108TB.
Lyve Drive Modular Array: A high-performance 4-bay array with flexible configuration so businesses can build what they need for a particular workflow.
Lyve Drive Rackmount Receiver: A high-performance datacenter 4U rackmount ingestion hub that accepts two Lyve Drive arrays for high-speed data transfer directly into a data center fabric without the need of cables.
Pricing and availability of Lyve Drive devices is not yet available. Check out Seagate’s website for more information.
Do any of these devices appeal to anyone? It’s pretty clear I’m not their target customer, and I wonder who is? Anyone?
I hope that seagate and wd steps up with the quality of their products.