When it comes to hard drives, Seagate is no stranger to the market. The company was incorporated back in 1978 and created the first hard disk drive in 1980. Of course they are well known on the PC side of things in general, but they have been pushing to make more of an impact when it comes to consoles and gaming overall.
Currently, Seagate has its FireCuda line of hard drives for both laptops and desktops. These drives are marketed towards the creative who enjoys photo and video editing and the gamer. They possess both the high capacity that us gamers need with the increasing size of games and the fast speeds that decrease load times. FireCuda drives are up to 5 times faster that some traditional drives. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the 2.5 inch drives and I was not disappointed.
Sticking to the gaming side of things, Seagate has been making external drives for both the Xbox One and the PS4 for a little while now. Recently they partnered with Microsoft and Xbox to release a new Xbox branded solid state hard drive. The drive will come in 500 GB, 1, and 2TB options. These are priced at $150, $300, and $600 respectively. Even though I upgraded to the Xbox One X with a 1TB hard drive, I filled that up ages ago. Programs like Games with Gold and Xbox Game Pass keep me close to capacity at all times.
When creating these drives, Seagate went through extensive testing and worked directly with Xbox. Seagate has made other drives for the Xbox in the past but this is a different beast. The drive itself operates with the same firmware that is installed on the console and Microsoft has stated that games run faster off of external hard drives. With the Xbox Seagate drive, they have seen load times decrease by up to 50 percent. You can really tell the difference in open world games.
Xbox gamers can look forward to picking one of these up towards the tail end of summer.
