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The FireCuda X Vault is an external 3.5-inch (yes, 3.5-inch!) hard drive with 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C connectivity. It’s a roughly rectangular black box with some mildly retro styling on the front as well as a configurable RGB lighting strip up the center of the top to spruce things up appearance-wise. Measuring approximately 7.75 inches long, by 5.25-inches wide, by 1.75-inches tall, the drive also weighs the better part of 3 pounds (2 pounds, 12.5 ounces). No, it’s not demure. Instead of rubber feet, there’s a large anti-skid pad covering a good 75 percent of the drive’s belly. That’s a good t

The 8TB version of the X Vault costs the aforementioned $270, but there’s also a 20TB version available for $530. I should mention that while hard disk drives are far more reliable these days than in the past, if you’re storing anything on them exclusively, about the only moderately affordable way to keep it backed up is to use another HDD of equal size as a mirror. The good news is that two 8TB X Vaults are still less than half the cost of an 8TB SSD.

If you’re looking for SSD speed, well, look at SSDs. The 8TB FireCuda X Vault that I tested is about capacity, not blazing performance. It clocks in at 200- to 210MBps for sequential transfers, with very HDD-like seek times of 20 to 25 milliseconds. It’s on the low end for a modern 3.5-inch hard drive. By way of comparison, I’ve seen its 3.5-inch brethren approach 300MBps. On the other hand, 2.5-inch external hard drives lag significantly around the 125MBps range, so the X Vault is certainly a step up from those. SSD-like or not, the X Vault is still fast enough to stream 4K movies, any kind o

If you need scads of storage space, and aren’t deadly serious about optimal performance, then the X Vault is easily one of the most affordable ways to accrue it. And after decades of having to corral wall warts for my external 3.5-inch hard drives — I get a real kick out of the X Vault’s lack thereof. Just remember that the X Vault is a hard drive, and treat it with the care it requires. And consider two if you store irreplaceable data on it that’s not otherwise backed up.