Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1Tb PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe

Product Information

A somewhat surprising addition to the list of top performers is the Phison E25-based is the new (as of November 2023) Crucial T500. What makes it an unlikely leader is that the E25 controller only has four NAND channels, compared to the eight more commonly found in high-end SSDs. The NVMe protocol – short for non-volatile memory express – was created to make the most out of solid state drives in combination with the PCI-Express (PCIe) interface. It replaces AHCI (paired with SATA), which was originally designed for mechanical hard drives. The newer protocol includes many efficiency improvements to deal with parallel transfers and the low-latency nature of SSDs. Here is where we start to see the value proposition of the FireCuda 520 start to drop, if by only a small amount. (This test does further illustrate the FireCuda's consistency in benchmarks, scoring squarely between the Corsair MP600 and the TeamGroup Z440 once again.) Copy Tests Technically, the 980 PRO is more of a successor to the 970 EVO Plus than to the 970 PRO. Previously, the PRO lineup has been exclusively based on higher-end MLC (multi-level cell) NAND memory chips. With the 980 PRO, Samsung has opted for the same cost-effective TLC chips that all of its competitors use. The newer Samsung 980 (non-PRO), on the other hand, is a DRAMless budget M.2 SSD that competes in the Gen3 category.

Outside of storage behemoths like Western Digital and Samsung – who develop and produce SSDs from the ground up in their own fabs –, Sabrent is one of the most interesting manufacturers. Although the company is a comparatively recent addition to the storage industry, it has consistently managed to be first on the market with a variety of attractive products, be it high-capacity M.2 drives, early PCIe Gen4 drives, or affordable QLC-based models. So, while the fastest M.2 SSDs now use the PCIe 5.0 standard, Gen4 SSDs are far more common. Gen4-capable systems start with Intel’s 11th/12th-gen Core platforms or AMD counterparts based on an X570 , B550 , or TRX40 motherboard or later. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test.M.2 SSDs (and other M.2 cards) come in different sizes and some motherboards – particularly in laptops – will only hold a drive up to a certain size. They also have different sets of notches (keying) that will prevent you from installing it the wrong way. M.2 Keying and Size This means if you plan on buying this drive and running a lot of sustained reads or writes on it (generally the only time a drive like this needs to be cooled down), then you should consider what passive or active cooling options your motherboard has available for the M.2 slot you plan to use.Some boards have nothing, but many higher-end models (the primary kind you'll be able to put a PCIe 4.0 drive on, incidentally) have hefty metal M.2 heatspreaders as part of the board design. Released in May 2022, the SK Hynix Platinum P41 is an entirely in-house design based on the manufacturer’s own 176-layer TLC NAND chips and uses a proprietary controller dubbed Aries. It also includes an SK Hynix LPDDR4 DRAM cache. Sequential performance is up to 7,000/6,500 MB/s (read/write) and random performance is up to 1.4M/1.3M IOPS. More importantly, it performs exceptionally well in real-world-oriented benchmarks such as 3DMark and PCM10. Moving on from PCMark 10-derived numbers, the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests, meanwhile, simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.

Those numbers may or may not be a minimum requirement, but also add – at the very least – the amount of RAM in your system to be on the safe side (to make room for the swap file). Office apps are usually not that demanding either, with MS Office taking up about 4 GB of space on your SSD. Games tend to use a lot more but can range in size from a few hundred megabytes to well over 100 gigabytes, i.e. a lot more demanding in terms of storage space. A bit of an anomalous result here. Despite running the test twice, the best score I was able to achieve on the ISO Copy portion of the test was well below that of the competition. (The numbers from the File Copy trace were right-on.) Let's see if that carries over into our sequential read and write tests in Crystal DiskMark 6.0. Crystal DiskMark 6.0 At the time of writing (October 2023), the Crucial T700 is the leading Gen5 SSD (alongside Teamgroup’s T-Force Cardea Z540). Thanks to the latest Micron NAND, sequential performance reaches 12,400 MB/s. That’s enough to put it ahead of earlier competitors using the same Phison E26 controller. High-capacity drives have additional memory chips mounted on the card and may require more space in some cases. The M.2 standard allows for cards of five different lengths, with the number format meaning width-length in millimeters. All sizes are the same width, so the two most common, 2280 and 2242, are 80mm and 42mm long, respectively (and so on). All sizes and usage examples: Pcie 4.0 is faster, about double that of pcie 3.0, or 16 Gbits/sec for a by 4 link which boils down to approx 8,000 Mega Bytes per second (theoretically)Gen5 SSDs can be expected to improve even further in terms of performance, efficiency, and not least pricing over the coming months and years. But for now, the Crucial T700 is the fastest consumer storage device you can get for your Gen5-capable PC. The only drive that can compete thus far is the T-Force Z540 from Teamgroup, which is largely based on the same hardware.

High-end NVMe SSDs are also slowly but steadily becoming even faster in gaming PCs thanks to GPU acceleration via Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. AMD and Nvidia are implementing this technology under the names Smart Access Storage and RTX IO, respectively. A couple of AAA titles that use DirectStorage technology include Square’s Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Fastest Gen5, Gen4 & Gen3 M.2 SSDs Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch. Mind you, these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more; in other words, more than just the program. Still, this is interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps. Consumer SSDs became common once density increased to two bits per cell, also known as multi-level cell or MLC. Most high-end drives today use the even denser triple-level cell, or TLC, memory type, whereas some budget SSDs use quad-level cell or QLC NAND. Unlike most other drives we've tested in this category, the FireCuda 520 does not include its own surface-mounted heatsink. While some drives, like the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440, come with a sleek, slim heatsink (in the case of the Cardea, a graphene/copper-based strip), and options like the Corsair Force Series MP600 have chunky, removable metal heatsinks mounted on top, the FireCuda 520 has neither.

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Seagate’s FireCuda 520 achieved peak sequential performance of about 5.0/4.3 GBps read/write in iometer, leaving it in a league of its own with the MP600.Random performance at QD1 was very respectable, and response times were very good, too, meaning the drive is plenty snappy. And, while meaningless for consumer tasks and even most prosumer workloads, its peak random performance hits 604,000/544,000 read/write IOPS. Sustained Sequential Write Performance & Temperature The only downside is that the Platinum P41 so far has been limited availability, as it’s still hard to find in the US and Europe. Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus is a lot more affordable than the PRO but very close in terms of actual performance. Although it doesn’t use high-end MLC NAND, this drive is still among the best in the PCIe Gen 3 category. The difference between an SSD and a hard drive regarding user experience is clearly noticeable. To date, the effect of shifting from one type of SSD to another is not nearly as dramatic, at least when it comes to gaming. These are some results from our own testing: These copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. While at first these numbers might look low compared to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, that's due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of and differences between the source data. If you're regularly moving files around on your drive from one folder to another, this test is a handy relative throughput measure.

Samsung was an undisputed leader in the SSD space for years, but more recently, the Korean electronics giant has often been unable to stay ahead of the competition. The 990 PRO is a return to form, with Samsung now retaking the lead in many key benchmarks that reflect real-world usage scenarios. As a result, the 2 TB model tops out at 10,000 MB/s sequential read/write speeds, while the 1 TB capacity is a bit slower at 9,500 MB/s (read) and 8,500 MB/s (write).

Seagate's latest drive is fast, but expensive.

First up, there's the overall PCMark 10 full system drive benchmark from UL. This score represents how well a drive does throughout the entire PCMark 10 run, and this score is the sanctioned score presented by UL's software at the end of each run. This score reflects a weighted average of the various simulated activities that the PCMark 10 storage test runs, from copying files to launching games, from booting an OS to running creative applications. It's a general indicator of how consistently a drive can perform through 23 different usage scenarios, meaningful only compared with the scores of other, competing drives. Samsung’s 980 PRO launched in late 2020 and was a market leader before the WD SN850 arrived. And to be fair – even after the arrival of the 2nd-gen Phison E18 SSDs, it is still the best M.2 SSD in some benchmarks. In other words, it remains a solid choice for any PCIe Gen4-capable system. At times, you can find it at a slight discount compared to the competition, which makes it even more attractive.