Seagate 520 PCIe 4 SSD
Seagate’s fastest SSD yet.
PCIe 4.0 SSDs have been trickling onto the market ever since the launch of AMD’s X570 platform, though they remain very much enthusiast- and prosumer-oriented drives, at least until we see budget chipset support and, particularly support, on Intel platforms. Seagate is the biggest company yet to jump aboard the PCIe 4.0 train with its FireCuda 520 series SSD and its specifications look very tasty indeed, easily faster than the best PCIe 3.0 drives. At $429 for the 1TB model, it’s definitely on the pricey side though. Is all the raw speed worth it?
The Seagate FireCuda 520 is a standard form factor M.2 2280 (80mm length) NVMe drive. In something that’s rare among PCIe 4.0 drives, the FireCuda 520 doesn’t come with a heatsink. This might seem like an oversight, but with almost all X570 and TRX40 motherboards coming with some form of integrated chipset and M.2 cooling, this actually makes perfect sense. Why include a cost-adding heatsink when most people will just remove it anyway?
It’s equipped with Phison’s commonly utilised PCIe 4.0 PS5016-E16 controller. It comes with 96-layer TLC NAND flash memory and a DDR4 DRAM cache. These specs are roughly equivalent to other PCIe 4.0 drives on the market right now. The 1TB FireCuda 520 comes with an endurance rating of 1,800 terabytes written, which is very good indeed. Seagate is obviously confident in the reliability of its 520 series. It also comes with a five year warranty.
As one of the world’s leading storage manufacturers, Seagate’s Seatools utility is highly regarded. It includes S.M.A.R.T. reporting, monitoring and firmware updating capability. You also have the option of downloading Seagate’s DiskWizard cloning software.
When it comes to performance, the FireCuda 520 delivered some of the best performance we’ve seen from any NVMe drive, with the exception of some of the Optane drives, which are admittedly more expensive. Straight transfer rates are faster than any PCIe 3.0 drive on the market. Its random read and write performance is also stellar. With its onboard DRAM cache, most users should see the drive’s full performance.
The Seagate FireCuda is a very strong contender from Seagate, though we’re yet to see entrants from big players such as Samsung or Intel. The FireCuda’s biggest competition comes from the likes of the Corsair MP600 and Aorus Gen 4 SSD’s which can be had for slightly cheaper. They’re all fairly similar in specification and performance. Which one you choose may come down to whether you need a heatsink or not.
If you’re after one of the fastest SSD’s on the market, and have a PCIe 4.0 motherboard, then the Seagate FireCuda 520 is a very good option, but it’s just a bit too pricey to unequivocally recommend right now. It’s got that very good endurance rating and with its PCIe 4.0 support, will remain useful in any system for many years to come.