Seagate FireCuda 520

Its endurance and warranty catch the eye, but it doesn’t set the world on fire

SCORE

PRICE 500GB, £66 (£79 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324fire

READ SPEED 3,574MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 1,7 22MB/ SEC

The FireCuda 520 is marketed as a gaming drive, but in this case that doesn’t mean pretty lights. Rather, Seagate has focused on reliability: the 500GB model we tested is rated for a whopping 850TBW, with the 1TB variant more than doubling that to 1,800TBW.

Even better, if the drive fails before its time, the five-year warranty includes three years of protection from Seagate’s datarecovery labs. Success isn’t guaranteed, but they will try to get your data back from a dead drive.

Although the FireCuda is compatible with PCI Express Gen4, we found its performance a little lacklustre. Sequential read speeds fell short of what we’ve seen from other Gen4 SSDs, and write speeds were below even most Gen3 models. This led to a mediocre score of 2,102 in the PCMark 10 system drive test.

Thankfully, those figures only apply to the 500GB model. Seagate claims that sequential writes are around 75% faster on the 1TB version, with random-access reads accelerating by a similar proportion (see

pcpro.link/324fire2). That brings it much closer to the sort of performance we would hope to see from a drive in this category.

Even so, the price is discouraging. This half-terabyte model comes in at 17p per gigabyte, while the faster 1TB drive will set you back £187, equivalent to 20p/GB. We see the appeal of the huge write endurance, and the data-recovery promise, but hopefully you’re already keeping regular backups, in which case the Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850 are smarter buys.