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The latest PCIe Gen 5 SSD to hit the market is the FireCuda 540 from storage giants Seagate. Powered by the current standard combination for a Gen 5 SSD of a Phison controller and 232-layer NAND, needless to say, it is the fastest consumer Seagate drive to date. We check out the 2TB model, landing at £300 here in the UK.
At launch, the FireCuda 540 family is made up of just two drives with capacities of 1TB and 2TB (the drive we are reviewing). A future option in the pipeline is a 4TB flagship drive. At the heart of the FireCuda 540 is Phison's PS5026-E26 8-channel controller which is looking after Micron 232-Layer TLC NAND.
Sequential performance for the 2TB drive is quoted as up to 10,000MB/s for both reads and writes while the official random read/write performance is quoted as up to 1,490,000 IOPS and up to 1,500,000 IOPS respectively. The 1TB drive has Sequential ratings of up to 9,500MB/s and up to 8,500MB/s for reads and writes respectively. It has the same up to 1,500.000 IOPS write rating as the 2TB drive with reads at up to 1,300,000 IOPS.
One thing that you must use with the FireCuda 540 is some form of motherboard cooling as it is a bare drive devoid of any form of heatsink.
Stated TBW endurance for the range is very impressive; 1,000TB for the 1TB drive and 2,000TB for the 2TB drive. Seagate back the drive with a 5-year warranty and a very useful bonus is the addition of 3 years of Seagate's Data Recovery Services.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 232-Layer Micron B58R TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5026-E26.
- Cache: LDDR4.
- Interface: PCIe Gen5 x4, NVMe 2.0.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80.15 x 22.15 x 3.58mm.
- Drive Weight: 7.4g.
Firmware Version: SUESR010.
