Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB SSD Review

Rating: 8.0.

The latest drive to join Seagate's growing portfolio of consumer SSDs is the FireCuda 520. Based around a Phison controller and BiCS4 96-Layer NAND, the PCIe Gen4 NVMe drive is the company's fastest consumer drive to date.

At the time of writing this review, there are three models in the FireCuda 520 line-up: 500GB, 1TB and the flagship 2TB drive. The new drive has opted for the well-used combination of a Phison E16 controller and Kioxia BiCS4 96-Layer TLC NAND, but with Seagate's hand firmly on the firmware.

Seagate quote Sequential read/write figures for the 1TB as up to 5,000MB/s and 4,400MB/s respectively. All three drives have the same 5,000MB/s Sequential read figure and the 2TB model shares the 1TB drive's write figure. However, the 500GB drive is only rated at 2,500MB/s.

Random 4K performance is quoted as up to 760,000 IOPS for reads and writes for the 1TB drive. The 2TB drive is rated as up to 750,00 IOPS for reads and 700,000 IOPS for writes while the 500GB drive is rated at 430,000 IOPS and 630,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively.

Seagate quote an endurance rating of 1,800 TBW for the 1TB drive and back it with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 1TB.
• NAND Components: Kioxia BiCS4 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND.
• NAND Controller: Phison PS5016-E16.
• Cache: 1GB DDR4.
• Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4 (NVMe 1.3).
• Form Factor: M.2 2280.
• Dimensions: 22.15 x 80.15 x 3.58mm.
• Drive Weight: 8.5g.

Firmware Version: STNSC011

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