Seagate FireCuda 120 SATA SSD Review: Fast, Expensive, and Enduring

Comparison Products

We put the Seagate FireCuda 120 up against some of the best SSDs on the market, including the SK hynix Gold S31, Crucial MX500, WD Blue 3D, Samsung’s 860 EVO, and 870 QVO. We also tossed the WD Red SA500 and Seagate IronWolf 110 into the mix for direct comparisons to other 4TB models.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Seagate Firecuda 120 finds itself in fourth place with a total load time of 12.47 seconds for the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark. It isn’t the fastest to load up the game’s levels, it smack-dab in the middle of the pack, but it does well overall and is faster than the high-capacity NAS SSDs and 870 QVO.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom dataset. We copy a 50GB dataset including 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

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With sufficient flash to maintain consistent write performance, our 4TB FireCuda 120 managed to top the chart in our large file folder copy test. It also performed well reading back the large zip file, but it wasn’t quite as responsive as the lower-capacity Crucial MX500 or Samsung 860 EVO. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test

PCMark 10 is a 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.

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Seagate’s FireCuda 120 scored top marks in the Quick System Drive benchmark, which is a test most relatable to those who use their PCs for leisure or basic office work. The FireCuda takes first place and proves to be a very responsive SSD.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool while ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

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Seagate’s FireCuda delivers fast sequential performance that rivals most of its competitors, and it tops the charts when it is halfway full of data. The FireCuda's random read and write speeds are also among the fastest, too, which helps to explain the high marks it scored in the PCMark 10 benchmark.

Sustained Write Performance & Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC 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 or QLC flash. 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.c

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Seagate’s FireCuda 120 features a small dynamic SLC cache. While we measured it at roughly 24GB-26GB, only 6GB of the cache recovers within a half-hour of idle rounds. The smallest capacities will see dips in write performance when the workload exceeds the cache, but the larger models should still deliver acceptable performance across the LBA range.

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