# WD Black vs Seagate firecuda (for only kontakt libraries)



## thevisi0nary (Jan 17, 2018)

Looking to add an additional drive. I normally would just buy the WD black and not think twice about it. But as far as I am reading this newer line of Seagate drives are basically just as fast as the Black drives? And they are half as much. What would you do in this situation?


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## DavidY (Jan 17, 2018)

I'm far from an expert so hopefully someone else will reply who knows more about this stuff, but I am also interested in the answer.

My understanding is that the Firecuda is a Hybrid drive, which is mainly standard 'spinning' HDD with an element of SSD which is used as a cache (perhaps 8GB but I struggle to figure this out from the Seagate website). In some use cases, most disk access can be handled from the cache and the speed edges towards SSD speeds. 

But if you regularly wanted to access more than the cache will hold, you're back down to spinning HDD speeds, and some of the Firecuda models are only 5400rpm (although I think this may only be the laptop-sized ones at the moment), which means it might end up being quite slow. 

I must admit I don't know how accessing a big sample library would work with a 8GB cache - I have an idea 8GB wouldn't be enough for good performance?

Whereas I think the WD Black is just a simple 7,200rpm spinning disk?


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## thevisi0nary (Jan 18, 2018)

This is very helpful info, thanks a lot.


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