The Seagate Firecuda is a 2.5-inch 'laptop-size' drive - a 2TB hybrid costing around £115/$130. What makes it stick out? Well for PlayStation users, it ticks a few crucial boxes if you're itching to upgrade the standard hard drive. Until this model came along, we've had 1TB as the maximum size for 2.5-inch hybrid drives. Even with on-board NAND memory to increase speeds, 1TB might still not be quite enough to make an upgrade worthwhile - after all, PS4 Pro ships with the same level of storage out of the box. But the big question is, can this upgrade deliver both a capacity upgrade and a notable performance bump over the stock drive?
The Firecuda 2TB is a classic example of cutting-edge tech opening up new options, potentially to be pushed further with time. Simply put, a 2TB laptop-size hybrid is possible thanks to a new technology, called shingled magnetic recording, or SMR for. This new method lets Seagate layer multiple tracks onto the mechanical platter for a more energy and space-efficient design. It moves away from the perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR, where decreasing the size of a bit on the platter makes drives thicker, heavier, and hotter. Past a certain point, this creates problems for installing larger hybrid drives on PS4.
In the end, SMR means this new 2TB Firecuda not only has capacity to its merit, but at 7mm in depth, is actually smaller than most drives we've put into the console. Indeed it's overkill, and makes you wonder if the technology could eventually make 4TB drives possible in the more conventional 2.5-inch/9.5mm form factor supported by PlayStation hardware. Time will tell on this front, but for now we have 2TB in the bag.
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