Review of Seagate Firecuda Gaming Dock: Multifunctional storage “boss” for gamers

Seagate has entered the mobile storage market for gamers with the FireCuda Gaming Dock. This is one of Seagate’s latest products, helping you to own a multifunctional, high-end storage center, combined with diverse connectivity with other peripherals.

The Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock adds the extra 4TB of HDD storage you get when you connect it to a computer equipped with a Thunderbolt 3 port.

Package includes: 4TB Gaming Dock, adapter, thunderbolt 3 cable, User manual, and 5 types of power cord

Design

FireCuda Gaming Dock is rectangular in design, measuring 27 x 13.5 x 4.6 cm (length x WIDTH X HEIGHT), weighs about 2.67 kg and is warranted for 3 years. The body is made of metal, the surface is covered with a black protective layer that has a velvet-like texture, soft and smooth. The top is also metal, finished with a matte gray paint with the Seagate logo and removable, hidden inside is an M.2 NVMe SSD hard drive slot. The bottom part has rubber feet to fix the position and the air outlet to cool the internal space of the dock.

The top has an RGB LED system and a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD expansion slot that adds speed to the Dock. However, you need to purchase the NVMe SSD separately to add it. Mounting the M.2 NVMe SSD is also quite simple. You just need to remove the top of the dock, remove the heatsink cover, attach the NVMe SSD and cover the heatsink cover, reattach the top of the dock. It is done!

Seagate gaming dock is equipped with a variety of peripheral connection ports

The front of the dock is the Power button, 2 USB 3.1 ports, 3.5mm audio output port and 3.5mm mic port. When connected to a computer/laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 port, the status light will light up in blue.

The back of the Dock has 1 DisplayPort 1.4 port, 3 USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 1 1GbE RJ-45 port.

Manage

Customization for the Gaming Dock is done through the Seagate Toolkit, which allows users to manage RGB LED settings, set up backup workflows, and folder synchronization options.

The FireCuda Gaming Dock is also compatible with Razer Synapse software and leverages Razer Chroma RGB lighting to synchronize colors with supported devices or gaming accessories, making your workspace stand out. your.

Performance

Seagate equips the Gaming Dock with a Seagate NAS IronWolf 4TB 7,200 RPM hard drive, a SATA 6 Gbps interface and 128MB DRAM cache, providing quite high performance for an HDD.

To evaluate the performance, I connected the Gaming Dock to the HP Specter x360 Convertible 13T-AW200 laptop via the Thunderbolt 4 40Gbps port and used two popular softwares, CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark.

CrystalDiskMark results give read speeds of 250.50 MB/s and write speeds of 248.51 MB/s. For ATTO Disk Benchmark software, the same results were obtained with read and write speeds of 248.54 MB/s and 239.7 MB/s.

Test results using CrystalDiskMark software

Test results with ATTO Disk Benchmark software

The Firecuda Gaming Dock is powered through a dedicated adapter. And both Thunderbolt 3 ports on the Dock are only used to connect to the laptop to transfer data, but cannot be used to power or charge the laptop. The Thunderbolt 3 hub can only charge or power peripherals and accessories.

The next performance measurement is to install and test the game directly on the Gaming Dock. I installed Rise of the Tom Raider game on the available 4TB HDD of the Dock, the game starts up almost immediately, the game load time is also quite fast, the gameplay is smooth, there is no lag phenomenon. That shows that the Gaming Dock gives gaming performance equivalent to installing it on the internal hard drive of a laptop or computer. If you want the game to start up and load quickly, you can add an M.2 NVMe SSD to the expansion slot available on the Dock.

Conclusion

The Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock is a multi-function storage hub with a variety of plug-and-play ports. Despite the relatively high cost, the benefits that the Gaming Dock brings are well worth the money such as powerful performance, customizable RGB LED lights, large storage capacity up to 4TB.

With a sleek, premium design, the Gaming Dock can also decorate the desk of any gamer or creative professional who needs more storage expansion.