Seagate has officially updated their FireCuda line, the solid-state supported, high-capacity hybrid drives. The new, 5th Gen models sport a thinner form-factor (2.5"), rocking the company's multi-tier cache technology as well as 1 TB SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) plates. The SMR plate's difference compared to conventional, perpendicular recording HDD technology allows these hybrid drives to increase storage density by up to 25%, by allowing newly-written magnetic tracks to partly overlap previously-written ones, reducing the amount of platter real-estate occupied.

The caveat with this technology is that the overlapping-tracks architecture may slow down the writing process, since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten as well. However, according to Seagate, the large, multi-tier cache technology and large NAND caches are enough to offset any performance loss incurred by the SMR technology employed on these drives, and then some.The new FireCuda line will offer storage in 500 Gb, 1 TB and 2 TB capacities, bringing compatibility with a wider range of devices thanks to their reduced z-height of 7mm. These feature 5400 RPM spindle speed, coming in with 128 MB of DRAM cache buffer. The maximum transfer rate and average latency for the FireCuda 2.5" are rated at 140 MB/s and 5.6 ms respectively, with all capacities shipping with the same amount of DRAM cache memory and 8 GB of MLC NAND cache, which works by swapping frequently used data to the faster NAND memory. The drives leverage the SATA 6 Gb/s protocol, with power consumption rated at 0.45 W idle, 1.6/1.7 W read/write power for the 500 GB and 1 TB drives, and 0.5 W idle, 1.7/1.8 W read/write power for their 2 TB sibling.

While shipping of the drives is already underway, official prices or market availability dates still haven't been disclosed. However, the 2 TB model is reportedly going to cost around $100. The five-year warranty that Seagate offers on their FireCuda line of hybrid drives are sure to bring more value to the table, being longer than the standard 2-year on Seagate's family of Barracuda consumer HDDs.