Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1Tb PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe

Product Information

Crucial’s T700 is not the first or only SSD to use the Phison E26 controller, but it currently outperforms the competition thanks to the latest and fastest NAND memory chips from Micron (Crucial is a Micron subsidiary).

The NVMe protocol – short for non-volatile memory express – was created to make the most out of solid state drives in combination with the PCI-Express (PCIe) interface. It replaces AHCI (paired with SATA), which was originally designed for mechanical hard drives. The newer protocol includes many efficiency improvements to deal with parallel transfers and the low-latency nature of SSDs. The only downside is that the Platinum P41 so far has been limited availability, as it’s still hard to find in the US and Europe.

Also ensure that the length of the drive is supported, e.g. 22 80 or 22 42 (numbers in bold are millimeters).

M.2 SSDs (and other M.2 cards) come in different sizes and some motherboards – particularly in laptops – will only hold a drive up to a certain size. They also have different sets of notches (keying) that will prevent you from installing it the wrong way. M.2 Keying and Size This benchmark consists of a range of gaming-related workloads that often apply to other usage scenarios as well. Its scores are based on the average bandwidth from a range of tasks that include loading, installing, saving, moving, and recording a number of specific games. In other words, it’s not a universal proxy for overall performance but one of the better ones for consumer workloads. 1. Fastest NVMe M.2 SSD: Crucial T700 (and T-Force Z540) 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 Seagate’s FireCuda 520 absorbed nearly 370GB of data before its write performance tanked. Once the pSLC cache is full, the write speed fell to an average of 600 MBps. After letting it idle for a bit, the cache should mostly recover. After 30 seconds, the drive recovered 16-20GB, and after just a minute, it recovered 63GB of pSLC space. Bear in mind, the cache capacity is dynamic. After an intense write workload, it only recovered 118GB of cache after idling for 5 minutes, and only 100GB after idling up to 30 minutes.

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. The latest and fastest iteration of the PCIe interface is 5.0 (Gen5), which became available with AMD’s B650 and X670 chipsets, as well as some Intel Z790 boards. There are relatively few Gen5 SSDs available at this point, but additional models will arrive throughout 2023. A somewhat surprising addition to the list of top performers is the Phison E25-based is the new (as of November 2023) Crucial T500. What makes it an unlikely leader is that the E25 controller only has four NAND channels, compared to the eight more commonly found in high-end SSDs.

Like all PCIe 4.0 drives, the Seagate FireCuda is rated for a generational leap in maximum sequential read and write speeds over PCIe 3.0 drives. Seagate cites a peak theoretical throughput of 5,000MBps for reads and 4,400MBps for writes in its 1TB and 2TB versions of the drive. (With the 500GB version, the rated write speed gets bumped down big-time, to 2,500MBps write.)Another detail worth noting is that, much like the FireCuda 530, you have to opt for the 2TB or 4TB models to get the best possible performance. 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.

In contrast, the utility's 4K (or "random read/write") tests simulate typical processes involved in program/game loads or bootup sequences. Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch. Mind you, these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more; in other words, more than just the program. Still, this is interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps. 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. The downsides to increased densities are – all other things being equal – worse performance and durability. Adding additional bits per cell adds to the complexity and cells will be worn down in fewer write/erase cycles.

Seagate's latest drive is fast, but expensive.

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. 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 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. 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.