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Seagate's latest Gen4 SSD comes with quite a mouthful of a name. The Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda is officially licensed by Lucasfilm and features three interchangeable heatsink face plates with the lightsaber designs of Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader built on them. Priced around £220 in the UK, is the Force with this new SSD, or will it fall to the Dark Side?
Sitting under the EKWB-designed heatsink is a Seagate FireCuda 530, the company's 2nd generation PCIe Gen4 drive. Just two capacities make up the product line, 1TB and the 2TB (the drive we are reviewing here) which means that two capacities are missing from the original FireCuda 530 line; the 500GB entry model and the 4TB flagship drive. The drive uses a combination of Phison’s PS5018-E18 NVMe 8-channel controller and Micron's B47R 176-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Seagate quote Sequential read performance figures for the Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda as up to 7,300MB/s for both drives. The 2TB drive gets a write rating of 6,900MB/s while the 1TB is a little slower at 6,000MB/s.
Random performance (4KB QD32, 8 threads) is stated as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for both reads and writes for the 2TB drive while the 1TB drive gets the same write rating with reads up to 800,000 IOPS.
Power consumption wise the 2TB drive is rated at 7.8W average active power, 25mW idle, and under 5mW in low power mode.
The 2TB drive being reviewed has an official TBW endurance rating of 2,550TB with Seagate backing the drive with a 5-year warranty. You also get three years of Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: Micron B47R 176-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5018-E18.
- Cache: DDR4-2666.
- Interface: PCIe Gen4 x4, NVMe 1.4.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80.15 x 25.0 x 19.0mm.
- Drive Weight: 47g.
Firmware Version: SU6SM003.
