SEAGATE FIRECUDA 530

A great choice for the most demanding users, but if you don’t need blazing speeds then you can save some cash.

★★★★☆ 1TB, $215 | seagate.com

Seagate’s top-of-the-range offering, the FireCuda 530, is built to be a thoroughly modern drive, delivering the fastest read and write speeds via its PCI-E Gen4 interface. We’ve reviewed the 2TB drive here, although it’s also available in 500GB, 1TB and 4TB sizes.

Before we get into the performance details, it’s first worth noting that this drive has a huge endurance figure of 2,550TBW for the 2TB drive, while the 1TB drive is 1,275TBW. That’s more than double the industry average of 600TBW for a 1TB drive.

While a figure of 600TBW means that a drive will last for as long as you’re likely to need it, having more endurance is particularly important if you’ve got demanding needs, such as for games or video editing, where the number of writes will be higher on average. This drive has no SDRAM, but uses an SLC cache instead. Performance is impressive, and read/ write speeds are exceptional with this drive. It scored 6,122MB/sec in the sequential read test and 5,765MB/sec in the write test. That’s the fastest result that we’ve seen from an SSD. It’s the same with the results in the random file test: 3,005MB/sec in the read test and 2,831MB/sec in the write test.

These speeds are phenomenal and show the FireCuda 530 is a high-end drive that can really cope with the most demanding needs. What’s more, that’s not just in a PC, as this drive is fully compatible with the PS5.

For everyday use, the FireCuda 530 is also good, but it drops down the league table compared to the WD Black SN850. The FireCuda 530 scored 3,100 in the PCMark 10 System Disk test and 4,478 in the Data Disk test. Both are good, but there are faster drives in this test that boost performance in normal use.

Those results shouldn’t take too much away from the FireCuda 530. Overall, the WD Black SN850 offers a slightly better balance of performance and price for regular use, but if you have more demanding needs, want a faster overall drive for large transfers and need the extra longevity, the FireCuda 530 is an excellent choice.

"For everyday use, the FireCuda 530 is also good, but it drops down the league table compared to the WD Black SN850."