If you're worried, WD throws in a five-year warranty. These are the drives I run in my rig, and I've never had a problem. You can start at as little as 500GB or get up to 6TB, depending on your budget. Thankfully, Western Digital dropped the 'Caviar' moniker, opting for just naming its HDD lines by their respective colors. More expensive than its Blue cousin - which we'll get to in a bit - the Black still represents a tremendous performance-to-value ratio. In a world where the FireCuda SSHD doesn't exist, the WD Black would be my top choice, not only for its performance and reliability but also for its price. They're great for game storage, especially for titles that don't need to load super quick like singleplayer games. While not the fastest performer, outdone by both the FireCuda and WD VelociRaptor, the Black drives are trustworthy and reliable. Western Digital's cream of the crop, the Black line, represents some of the best the company has to offer with traditional mechanical hard drives. You can still get higher capacities without breaking the bank, all while experiencing improved performance that is noticeably better than even a 7200 RPM HDD.

The whole point of the FireCuda is to enhance the traditional mechanical hard drive. It's easy to get excited about the possibilities with this drive, but even a SATA SSD will still outpace it by a considerable margin. For games, it might help with initial load times after you've launched the game a few times. The benefits of the 8GB NAND aren't always readily apparent since the drive effectively learns your most used applications and loads them faster. At 5400 RPM, the drive itself is quieter and generates less heat. With SATA 6Gb/s support onboard, Seagate promises a 140MB/s read speed. The flash unit speeds up read/write speeds. It features an embedded 8GB NAND along with up to 2TB of traditional storage to create an enhanced drive. Not quite a hard drive, not quite an SSD, the Seagate FireCuda blends both storage types into one unit, an SSHD, if you will.

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