Seagate FireCuda X1070 2TB SSD review: Entry-level hardware meets premium support

Comparison Products

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 lands in a crowded marketplace. Older drives, or newer drives at lower performance ranges, often still linger on. This includes the Teamgroup MP44L, the Crucial P3 Plus, and the newer TeamGroup NV5000. A step up from there is the Kingston NV3, which fills the gap between these and higher-end drives. The NV3 is, in fact, a capable drive, but because it can use a range of hardware, its specifications are more restrained. More common FireCuda X1070 competitors include the Biwin NV7200 and TeamGroup MP44Q, which form a good baseline for performance expectations in its price range.

The FireCuda X1070 is perhaps at a disadvantage with its controller, but it makes up for it with guaranteed 232-layer flash and decent support. At the very top of these largely QLC-based drives are the Crucial P310, which is no longer technically on the market, and the WD Blue SN5100, now fully a SanDisk property, which leads the way.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

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3DMark performance is decidedly mediocre, with 53µs latency being closer to the original budget Gen 4 SSDs like the MP44L. This is plenty fast for gaming and will beat Gen 3 drives handily for the most part, but it is far from the fastest. Many systems will be bottlenecked elsewhere, so the impact on loading times will be small. Still, if you’re building a multi-drive gaming system, there are better options if you want the best performance.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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Would the FireCuda X1070 be our first choice for a serious work system? No, but it actually does surprisingly well in PCMark. Application bandwidth is up there where it should be, with the higher-end DRAM-less options like the NV7200 and MP44Q. The NV3 also does surprisingly well in this test, so maybe that’s not too unusual. This indicates that throughput is the most important indicator here – that is, sequential bandwidth more than the drive hardware – which seems obvious until you see all scores, including latency, track this way. Put another way, drives that can reliably push data will score higher, and that means the P310 and SN5100. The SN5100 stands out with its BiCS8 QLC flash, while the P310 is simply well-optimized. The FireCuda X1070 falls into a respectable range, which means it’s going to feel better than older drives, at least.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

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The X1070 supplies enough performance to make the PS5 sing. It would be a solid choice for extending your console storage. It should also work without a heatsink in this capacity, but we do recommend one for peace of mind. It’s worth protecting your hardware, and more so now than ever with creeping storage prices. Heatsinks costs in comparison remain relatively flat.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

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The X1070 reads very fast, writes pretty fast, but copies pretty slowly. This is likely due to the controller. Read performance can be improved in multiple ways, and the TC2201’s error correction scheme seems oriented toward balancing performance and flash endurance in a very flexible way. Our drive is very new, so one would expect it to perform well, anyway. Write speed tends to be more limited by the flash, but Micron’s N58R is pretty fast for what it is. It’s therefore likely that the controller's relative weakness limits the drive’s copy performance. The good news is that copying in this manner is not a typical application if you are running more than one SSD. The performance on this is quite good if it’s a secondary drive. As a primary drive, it’s closer to the lower end of budget options and should be treated as such.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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The FireCuda X1070’s ATTO performance is good and more or less consistent, with a few things to note. The first is the drop at 2MiB for reads, which can happen for a variety of reasons, including throttling, but we control for that. Controller and flash nuances, or nuances of certain combinations, can also throw off the curve. This depends on the size of the I/O, but also the queue depth, and we check QD1 sequential performance in CDM to verify. What we find is that the X1070 is surprisingly good at QD1 sequential reads using the very typical 1MB size, which is good enough for us to say it will feel responsive with app loading.

Sequential write performance, particularly in ATTO, is generally weaker until you get up to larger block sizes. This actually can be a good thing for a secondary drive, as many files will be in the 1MiB+ range. Multimedia files and many game files come to mind. Backups also tend to be large and sequential with output files. The weaker small I/O performance means this drive is not ideal for use with heavier or even mixed workloads, as would be typical with workstation use or other high-performance workflows. This is further supported by its weak random write latency result in CDM.

Random read latency is also poor, but it’s possible this drive would do better with stale data. We do precondition our drives, but real-world use may see different results over time. We suspect this controller might maintain performance longer, especially with QLC flash, due to its slightly unorthodox design. Random 4KB reads at QD1 are a fan favorite, but a lot of app and game loading correlates more directly with QD1 sequential reads. As a result, the overall “feel” of this drive might be better than the 55.44µs latency otherwise indicates, especially as the drive ages.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states, including the steady-state write performance.

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The FireCuda X1070 writes in two distinct modes. The first is the ultra-fast pSLC mode, and the second is the ultra-slow “folding” mode, where the drive is forced to wait for data to move over to free up space. This first mode, which is also known as caching, writes at 6.28 GB/s for over 68 seconds. The ~428GB cache is fairly large – although when converting 2TB of 4-bit QLC flash to a 1-bit pSLC mode, you could have a cache over 500GB – and is able to handle even very large writes. Once the cache is exhausted, the drive writes feebly to the native QLC flash while also moving data over from the pSLC, writing at a paltry 200 MB/s. The flash itself is faster than this, but because the controller is juggling incoming writes with space-freeing actions, the average speed – and as a result, also the drive’s responsiveness – declines significantly from the expected peak.

This is the “nightmare” that you have come to expect from QLC flash. Sequential write speeds slower than mechanical HDDs? Yes. This is the worst-case, though, and the FireCuda X1070 actually beats three drives here. The fastest QLC-based drive is the Blue SN5100, and even that manages something at or below what a good SATA SSD could do. SATA drives have much higher latency, yes, but if you push an NVMe drive to folding, the actual responsiveness can actually feel as bad or worse. In other words, you really want to avoid saturating the entire pSLC cache on the X1070 and other budget drives.

We feel this could be especially true of the X1070 because it’s working with what we consider a less powerful controller, or at least one that’s not capable of handling heavier workloads. Further, the controller’s design seems to favor enhancing reads or at least read consistency. This can improve endurance if it’s able to read flash more consistently over the drive’s lifespan before having issues, and can also improve effective endurance by being able to maintain superior latency longer before having to rewrite stale data. Therefore, running out of cache is especially bad as it bypasses some advantages of the design, but this shortcoming makes sense – this is not a drive designed for heavy writes.

One reason for this is that data written to cache and then copied to native flash has low write amplification. Writing directly to the native flash – which is happening at least part of the time during folding – increases write amplification. And also not deferring writes – if the drive has to move data over it might be moving data that normally wouldn’t be written twice – increases write amplification as well. This increases flash wear, which indirectly impacts the drive’s ability to hit its TBW target. This is important to emphasize because TBW is not a substitute for raw endurance. We don’t think this will be an issue even over five years, but we also would caution against doing heavy writes on this drive. It’s better designed for read-heavy workloads.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

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We would expect this drive to be efficient, however that’s not the outcome we see. The slimmer primary controller design and the new-enough flash should pull less power than what’s found on older drives, but the FireCuda X1070 doesn’t hold up well within its own class. We expected weaker performance in some areas, which, to some degree, we got, so the trade-off should be better power efficiency. In fact, our test workload pushes the drive away from its optimized path, and the controller ultimately has to work harder to compensate. It’s not designed for a full-on thrashing and, as a result, scores lower in our testing. This is one reason its efficiency is not as good as anticipated. We can support this assertion by looking at peak power draw, which does significantly exceed Seagate’s average datasheet rating – under the usual desktop load, this drive will be more efficient.

The good news is that the drive itself doesn’t run too hot. Centralizing the controller with space between the NAND flash modules may help a bit in this regard. Otherwise, the chip has enough surface area to handle our workload just fine. The drive only gets to about 30°C below the first throttling point – reading 54°C with the warning temperature at 85°C – which means it’s fine to run the drive naked in laptops and the PS5. TenaFe has an industrial version of this controller with a massive temperature operating range, so we think it knows what it’s doing when it comes to handling diverse environments. This is not a case where you’ll have an overheating drive that suddenly fails.

Battery impact should also be small. Real-world workloads and proper idle power settings should make this drive more efficient. We wouldn’t recommend it for heavier workloads as it’s simply less efficient for them. The QLC flash reduces potential steady-state performance and shows noticeable weaknesses under some heavier workloads, but a daily driver laptop won’t be pushing this drive at all.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Seagate FireCuda X1070 Bottom Line

The Seagate FireCuda X1070 is an interesting drive in some ways. This is a common theme with Seagate drives lately, as we feel the same way about the FireCuda 530R. What makes the FireCuida X1070 strange is that it’s using a less common controller, one that usually ends up in generic brands as a hardware swap. Seagate has managed to pair it with the right flash to make it more tenable in the class it occupies, which is on the faster side of budget Gen 4 SSDs. That’s almost a contradictory statement, especially when we’re looking at QLC flash. However, when QLC drives are running under normal operating conditions, they can absolutely feel fast. Drives like the WD Blue SN5100 and Crucial P310 often outperform TLC-based drives.

Seagate supplies this drive with the same support it gives the FireCuda 530R – five years, three years of data recovery services, full software support – and also gives it up to double the TBW of equivalent drives in its class, like the Biwin NV7200. This makes the FireCuda X1070 feel more like a premium-lite drive than one of the underclass cobbled together by whatever hardware is available. The company makes this work by perhaps saving money on the controller, which actually fits its plans well because it can work with a range of flash and make the most of it. It’s a weird juxtaposition of a quality experience and entry-level hardware, but it dovetails nicely with Seagate’s approach to the FireCuda 530R. It’s hitting two different areas of the market at once, and both in a novel way. We appreciate the risk-taking.

What the FireCuda X1070 actually delivers is an experience that is, on the whole, pretty good, even if it makes a better console or secondary drive than a primary hard-hitter. It’s also good for laptops, which tend to see lighter use. For new desktop builds or HTPCs where you are trying to save money, it also makes sense. The warranty and support are strong enough to carry it, in our opinion. While the drive is weak in some areas, such as in our power efficiency test, its baseline performance is adequate for this class of drive. We think the TC2201 controller might be misunderstood and should not be confused with the “USB flash drive controller” swaps we’ve seen on some SATA SSDs or anything like that. The FireCuda X1070 is a deliberate design, and that’s something that might not be conveyed well in more lax reviews.

As a result, we can recommend this drive more than a lot of contenders that have seen tons of hardware swapping or over generic, no-name brands that might even use this same controller. Our main criticism here is the pricing. Seagate clearly intends this for a different market than the FireCuda 530R, and it needs to be priced appropriately. It’s an entry-level drive – in a manner of speaking – with better support than something like the WD Green SN3000. It’s elevated to compete against some tough drives, which means it has to punch above its weight to survive, putting it in a difficult place where its price has to help compensate for its sometimes underwhelming performance, even though it has solid support. If Seagate can price it competitively, we think it could become a fan favorite.

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