Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are going to be switching over to v7.0 of the benchmark in the very near future so we've got results for both benchmarks.

At a queue depth of 32, the Seagate FireCuda 520 has the slowest write score of the PCIe Gen4 drives we've tested to date. At a queue depth of 1, the difference in writes compared to all bar the Patriot VP4100 is hardly noticeable. Looking at the two CrystalDiskMark result screens it appears that the Phison PS5012-E12 controller is much more efficient when reading compressible data at certain queue depths.

The latest version of CrystalDiskMark, version 7, includes a couple of profiles that can be used for testing – Peak Performance and Real World. The result screens for these two profiles not only display MB/s results but also IOPS and latency.

Looking at the Peak Performance results for Sequential read/write performance we see that the review drive surpassed the official Sequential read figure of 5,000MB/s, both at the default setting (5,010MB/s) and especially when dealing with compressible data (5,621MB/s). However, the fastest write figure of 4,293MB/s is still a little slower than the official 4,400MB/s figure.

We also used CrystalDiskMark, version 7, to test the drive at a couple of the queue depths where most workloads occur. The drive produced strong performance figures throughout the tests.

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