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It was only a matter of time until SSDs really got hooked into the gaming scene and today, there isn’t a gamer around without flash media overseeing the storage of their gaming system. Seagate released their FireCuda 520 back in December of 2019 with the ‘FireCuda Gaming’ label and today we are reporting on their latest release, the FireCuda 530 with the new ‘Seagate Gaming’ label included on exterior packaging, as well as ‘FireCuda Gaming’.
Our Test sample today is a 2TB Seagate FireCuda and exterior packaging lists 7GB/s read and write, along with free available copy of Rescue Data Recovery software and a selection of FireCuda adhesive banners for your PC.
The Seagate FireCuda 530 is a PCIe 4.0 (Gen 4) four lane (x4) M.2 2280 (80mm) NVMe SSD which relies on the latest NVM Express 1.4 protocol. It is available in 500GB, 1, 2 and 4TB capacities and performance increases with capacity. Our 2TB version lists at 7GB/s read and write on the package, which differs from this Data Sheet specs of 7.3GB/s read and 6.9GB/s write.
Checking Amazon, we see the FireCuda 530 listed but not available at this time. Listed MSRP is $254.99 for the 1TB and $514.99 for the 2TB models with other capacities to follow. This SSD comes with a 5-year limited warranty. Check Amazon for availability and pricing.
The Seagate FireCuda 530 contains the Phison PS5018-E18 eight channel NVMe SSD controller, eight pieces of Micron 176-layer TLC NAND flash memory, along with two pieces of SKHynix DDR4 buffer DRAM memory. If you are looking for the best combination of available components in an SSD today, this is what you might find.
Endurance is something we might not mention often but cannot be overlooked in this case. We have always believed that a manufacturers endurance ratings and warranty speak volumes and the Seagate FireCuda 530 does just that. TBW ratings for this 2TB sample are 2550TB…or 2.5 petabytes. If you latch on to the 4TB version, it jumps to 5.1PB which means you could write to 70% of the drive every day for five years. We don’t think there is another manufacturer in the industry making this claim.
As there are eight NAND packages, each would be of a 256GB RAW capacity, with the formatted volume available to the consumer being 1863GB.
You didn’t mention it, but I guess this has Micron’s newest B47R Fortis 3D TLC memory that is in the Phison E18 B47R Fortis NVMe Gen 4 SSD Evaluation Sample Preview you reviewed a little while ago? If so, then I guess this would be the first commercially-released SSD with this new memory.
However, the Phison E18 B47R Fortis NVMe Gen 4 SSD Evaluation Sample Preview lists a little better in the low 4K read and write speeds. Could this be due to different firmware, or just a difference in test samples?
Great stuff, Dave.
Was about to ask the same question.
Would be cool if you could make a toplist of currently fastest ssds..