If you want to level up your laptop gaming experience, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock gives you plenty of ports, and more storage space. It also looks nice on your desktop, but does add some heat to your room.
Quick specs
- Built-in 4TB storage, NVMe expansion slot
- 2x Thunderbolt USB Type-C, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, LAN port, 4x USB 3.1 Type-A, USB 3.1 Type-A charger port, 3.5mm headset, 3.5mm microphone
- Customisable RGB lighting strip
Design-wise, the FireCuda Dock is a solid block, with a RGB light strip near the end. That's also where the dock opens up to give access to an NVMe slot. There's no catch or hook as it snaps into place magnetically. It's also pretty easy to install, just open the cover with a screwdriver, slot your NVMe card in, and close everything back. Found on the front are the power button, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, as well as headphone and microphone audio jacks. At the rear are two Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C ports, one for the laptop to connect, and the other for peripherals. Also at the back are three USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a DisplayPort 1.4 port, and a RJ-45 LAN port.
You can hook up two monitors — via DisplayPort and the Thunderbolt 3 port. You can also daisy chain using the Thunderbolt 3 port if your laptop supports it. The dock comes with a 4TB HDD built-in for you to store stuff. If you want to change the color of the RGB lighting, you have to download the Seagate Toolkit app. This software is available for both Windows and macOS. Note that with only 15W downstream, this dock won't be able to charge your laptop. You will need to plug in your normal charger to keep your notebook running at peak efficiency.
As for the dock's performance, the internal HDD is pretty much what you'd expect it to be — slow. It has a read/write speed of around 245MB/s. For the NVMe test, we used the Samsung 980 NVMe SSD, which provides read/write speeds of up to 3,500/3,000MB/s. However, because it's mounted externally, I only managed to get a read speed of 1,556.88MB/s and a write speed of 738.96MB/s. That's still fast enough for most games.
At S$569, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Dock packs enough features to justify its price. It makes it easy to just plug in one cable into your laptop to connect all your devices. However, you will still need to plug in another cable for power. Get it from Lazada or Shopee.
Note: Review unit provided by Seagate.
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