Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1Tb PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe

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After writing over 300GB of data at once and saturating its bandwidth, the FireCuda 520’s SMART data reported a peak controller temperature of 79C, but we measured about 85C on our infrared thermometer. However, the drive didn’t throttle after writing over 300GB of data at once with no airflow in a 25C environment. Power Consumption The magic ingredient appears to be its 232-layer NAND from Micron, which is able to propel this drive all the way to the top of several benchmark charts versus other Gen4 drives. We have recently observed the same trend even in DRAM-less SSDs like the impressive Teamgroup MP44, but the Crucial T500 does employ an LPDDR4 DRAM buffer that gives it an edge in many workloads. Unlike most other drives we've tested in this category, the FireCuda 520 does not include its own surface-mounted heatsink. While some drives, like the TeamGroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440, come with a sleek, slim heatsink (in the case of the Cardea, a graphene/copper-based strip), and options like the Corsair Force Series MP600 have chunky, removable metal heatsinks mounted on top, the FireCuda 520 has neither. Technically, the 980 PRO is more of a successor to the 970 EVO Plus than to the 970 PRO. Previously, the PRO lineup has been exclusively based on higher-end MLC (multi-level cell) NAND memory chips. With the 980 PRO, Samsung has opted for the same cost-effective TLC chips that all of its competitors use. The newer Samsung 980 (non-PRO), on the other hand, is a DRAMless budget M.2 SSD that competes in the Gen3 category. Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

This means if you plan on buying this drive and running a lot of sustained reads or writes on it (generally the only time a drive like this needs to be cooled down), then you should consider what passive or active cooling options your motherboard has available for the M.2 slot you plan to use.Some boards have nothing, but many higher-end models (the primary kind you'll be able to put a PCIe 4.0 drive on, incidentally) have hefty metal M.2 heatspreaders as part of the board design. Another thing is the queue, I would not expect any normal desktop user to have a workload that makes use of a queue depth of more than 2 or 3 in the worst of cases so the 60,000 depth for desktops is mostly a wash Those numbers may or may not be a minimum requirement, but also add – at the very least – the amount of RAM in your system to be on the safe side (to make room for the swap file). Office apps are usually not that demanding either, with MS Office taking up about 4 GB of space on your SSD. Games tend to use a lot more but can range in size from a few hundred megabytes to well over 100 gigabytes, i.e. a lot more demanding in terms of storage space. Consumer SSDs became common once density increased to two bits per cell, also known as multi-level cell or MLC. Most high-end drives today use the even denser triple-level cell, or TLC, memory type, whereas some budget SSDs use quad-level cell or QLC NAND. So, while the fastest M.2 SSDs now use the PCIe 5.0 standard, Gen4 SSDs are far more common. Gen4-capable systems start with Intel’s 11th/12th-gen Core platforms or AMD counterparts based on an X570 , B550 , or TRX40 motherboard or later.

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For the test comparisons below, the Corsair and TeamGroup drives are the other PCIe 4.0 contenders; the ADATA, Sabrent, and WD drives are PCIe 3.0. PCMark 10 Overall Storage Test Here the drive falls right in line with its overall results from the PCMark 10 run, scoring comfortably above the Corsair MP600 and just slightly below the TeamGroup drive when launching Windows 10. Launching Games Samsung’s 980 PRO launched in late 2020 and was a market leader before the WD SN850 arrived. And to be fair – even after the arrival of the 2nd-gen Phison E18 SSDs, it is still the best M.2 SSD in some benchmarks. In other words, it remains a solid choice for any PCIe Gen4-capable system. At times, you can find it at a slight discount compared to the competition, which makes it even more attractive.

At the time of writing (October 2023), the Crucial T700 is the leading Gen5 SSD (alongside Teamgroup’s T-Force Cardea Z540). Thanks to the latest Micron NAND, sequential performance reaches 12,400 MB/s. That’s enough to put it ahead of earlier competitors using the same Phison E26 controller.

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Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs such as the Aorus Gen5 10000 and Corsair MP700, all of which also use the Phison E26, can reach sequential read speeds of around 10,000 MB/s, but the Crucial T700 goes all the way up to 12,400 MB/s.

I see this expressed incorrectly a lot, the disk manufacturers do it constantly to try and make their drives seem faster. High-end SSDs and recent motherboards use an M-key slot, as this is the only type that provides four lanes of bandwidth, or 20 Gbit/s, also known as PCIe x4. B-key supports ‘only’ PCIe x2 or 10 Gbit/s. Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another…

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