Seagate has released its fastest SSD for client PCs to date. The FireCuda 530 is a PCIe 4.0 x4 gaming SSD that offers up to 7.3 GB/s data transfer rates and an endurance that comfortably exceeds levels offered by client drives today. In addition, the drives come with Seagate's Data Recovery Service, for added peace of mind.
The Seagate FireCuda 530 family features drives in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. The series is based on the Phison PS5018-E18 platform (eight NAND channels, 32 CEs, NVMe 1.4, DRAM caching support) with the latest 3D TLC NAND memory that was greatly enhanced by Seagate's engineers in a bid to maximize endurance and performance. The drives comes with a fairly thick EKWB-designed low profile aluminum heatsink to ensure predictable performance under high loads.
As far as performance is concerned, Seagate rates its FireCuda 530 2TB and 4TB models for up to 7,300 MB/s sequential read speed, up to 6,900 MB/s sequential write speed, and up to 1,000,000 random read/write IOPS. This is much higher compared to competing drives powered by the Phison E18 platform. High performance comes with rather high power consumption that ranges from 5.8W to 8.4W.
Performance of Seagate's FireCuda 530 deserves nothing but respect, yet the company also went above and beyond with endurance of these SSDs. The entry-level FireCuda 500GB is rated for up to 640 terabytes to be written (TBW) over five years, whereas the top-of-the-range FireCurd 4TB features a 5,100 TBW. From drive writes per day (DWPD) point of view, Seagate guarantees a 0.7 DWPD rating, which is at least two times higher compared to 0.3 DWPD guaranteed by competing drives.
One thing to note is that high-capacity FireCuda 530 drives are double sided, so they are physically thicker than 500GB and 1TB models.
Seagate's FireCuda 530 will be available from the company's retail partners shortly. The cheapest 500GB model will carry a $139.99 MSRP, whereas the top-of-the-line 4TB SKU will be priced at $949.99.
