Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB
FUNNY OLD THING, the storage market. You might have expected the traditional magnetic drive outfits to pile heavily into solid-state storage. After all, the writing isn’t just on the wall for those magnetic platters, it’s burned right into their spinning surfaces. It’s not that the future is solid-state, the shift has already happened.
Until now, the exception has been WD, with the SN850 Black being a particular success and one of the best of the current generation of PCIe Gen 4 drives (read about the SN850 at the end of the group test). But Seagate? While it has been active in the SSD market, it hasn’t exactly made headlines.
That deserves to change with the new Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB. It’s a very good drive. Surprisingly, given Seagate’s status as a longtime big hitter in the storage market, this M.2 drive uses, yes you guessed it, the Phison E18 controller. Just like the PNY XLR8 CS3140 and Kingston Fury Renegade, not to mention numerous other drives on the market. Pretty much every Phison-based drive we’ve tested flies. So, that’s got to be a good thing.
As for NAND flash memory specification, Seagate has likewise gone for Micron’s latest 176-layer TLC NAND memory. Micron reckons it’s quicker, denser, and more durable than its existing 96-layer memory chips. In our experience, the 176-layer stuff is up there with the very best. This is also the
2TB configuration of the FireCuda 530, so it gets 2GB of DDR4 cache. For headline performance, Seagate claims 7,300MB/s for peak reads and 6,900MB/s for writes. So far, then, this all feels like a fairly familiar, if impressive, recipe.
If there is an exception to the identikit spec list, it involves write endurance. Seagate rates the 2TB model of the FireCuda 530 as good for 2,550TB of writes, which is moderately staggering. We suspect Seagate has used its undoubted experience and engineering nous to tweak the Phison E18’s firmware to allow for a bit more endurance than the direct competition.
Whatever, it’s hardly a shock to find this drive knocks out numbers not dissimilar to other Phisonbased Gen 4 M.2 SSDs. Indeed, for sequential reads and writes, it’s essentially indistinguishable from the Kingston Fury Renegade
2TB. Which is to say it’s fast, seriously fast. Only the XPG Gammix S70 2TB is quicker in terms of reads, but not by all that much.
Also in line with other Phison drives is the 4K random access performance, with 83MB/s reads and 251MB/s writes. All the while, this thing keeps impressively cool, maxing out at 41°C. That’s especially good considering this drive doesn’t have a heat sink. If you’re wondering about sustained performance and the size of the FireCuda 530’s SLC cache, we found full performance is maintained for at least 700GB of writes, which has to be enough for just about any realistic workload.
Add it all up and you have a speedy, cool-running drive. There isn’t much that’s tangibly quicker out there on the market, something you can of course say about most Phison E18-based M.2 Gen 4 SSDs. The other thing you can say about this SSD, along with its Phison pals, is that it’s pricey. It’s a legitimate question to ask if you can feel the difference compared to cheaper and ultimately only slightly slower drives.
That said, the FireCuda 530 arguably has a trump card that places it apart from its direct competitors. As hinted by the exceptional endurance rating, if our lives depended on one of the Phison drives here outlasting the others, we’d choose this Seagate drive and the reputation and experience that comes with one of the best-known brands in storage.