Introduction
Seagate has been one-half of the HDD rivalry that has shaped the industry for years. Having battled it out with countless brands, it culminated with only WD and Seagate remaining in the mainstream market. But markets evolve and so, too, does storage and none moreso right now with the ever increasing growth of SSD solutions populating the market, bringing prices close the near-HDD price-to-GB ratio.
Seagate may be a little late in the SSD game and that’s given them plenty of time to really flesh their tech and segregate their stack for their SSD port folio. Seagate offers a similar stack to their HDD lineup with both the Barracuda and FireCuda segments appearing in their SSD lineup. Today we’ll take a look at the Seagate FireCuda 510, Seagate’s top end SSD offered in both 1TB and 2TB capacities only. This means it can easily replace your primary drive for OS and app storage or for most notebook users, their entire drive. Given the form of the FireCuda 510, its friendly to many applications that can take in an M.2 2280 size drive.
That said, Seagate is playing it safe with PCIe Gen4 devices in the horizon and has went with a more familiar Phison E12 with Toshiba TLC NAND. This has been an effective choice for other familiar brands in the space and Seagate isn’t necessarily taking a risk here with the choice of specs. Their market alignment, as well as their notable freshness in the scene are what some may scoff at but we’ll let the numbers do the talking in this review. Read on to find out more about the Seagate FireCuda 510 in this review.
What Seagate has to say about the FireCuda 510:
Upgrade Your Gaming Experience.
FireCuda® 510 SSD was developed and built specifically with the needs of professional-level gamers in mind.
How far could you go with a gaming SSD built for industry-leading speed, superior gaming, sustained abuse, and the lowest latency?
Seagate Stack
Here’s how the current consumer stack for Seagate looks. We have the FireCuda 510 SSD sitting on top offering large capacities as well as top performance. The FireCuda SSHD offers a great balance of performance and capacity for both 2.5″ and 3.5″ form factors. The BarraCuda 510 SSD offers top performance as well for less cost and is great for upgraders and portable systems. Last up, we have the BarraCuda SATA SSD offers faster performance than traditional hard drives and offers capacities up to 2TB.
All Seagate products have an industry leading 5-year warranty.
Specification and Features – Seagate FireCuda 510
- Meet the high-speed SSD for pro-level PC gamers and creative pros—delivering up to 3450/3200MB/s sequential read/write speeds and 1TB of massive capacity
- High IOPS ensure consistently smooth streaming, high-speed PC game downloads, and seamless application usage
- Ultra-slim M.2 2280 form factor is designed to handle the sustained abuse of top-tier gaming PCs and gaming laptops
- Enjoy long-term reliability with 1.8M hours MTBF
- Get long-term peace of mind with the included five-year limited warranty
Packaging and Closer Look
Seagate has been establishing distinctions between its consumer product lines for a while now with the presence of their Barracuda, Firecuda, Ironwolf, etc. line. The Barracuda line are mainstream consumer products with the FireCuda targeting pro and power users. The IronWolf are designed for industrial use particularly NAS. For the FireCuda 510 we are greeted with a new color packaging, maybe a new look for many but Seagate marketing has been using this design for quite some time now.
Inside the packaging we have some documentation as well as the FireCuda 510 M.2 SSD inside. The disk is packaged in a anti-static sheet clasped onto cardboard. We feel this is rather exhaustive and a simple thermo-formed recycled plastic or paper would’ve done the job.
The FireCuda 510 comes at only 1TB and 2TB capacities. The BarraCuda 510 will target mainstream consumers and offers capacities in 256GB and 512GB. All models support PCIe Gen3 x4 interface with the FireCuda 510 allowing faster performance thanks to the increased number of NAND memory to interface with. Focusing on the design of the product itself, the Seagate Barracuda features a branding sticker on one side. This is not a heatspreader which I feel is a missed opportunity to make the FireCuda 510 a bit more premium.
The other side also features a branding sticker, again not a heatspreader.
The FireCuda 510 has a total drive write endurance rating of 1300 TBW for the 1TB capacity and double that at 2600 for the 2TB. This means you need to be making 800GB worth of writes every day for the next 5 years to exhaust the 1TB drive badly and for the gaming audience that’s not really something to be concerned about.
Seagate’s companion software for their storage devices, SeaTools, allows monitoring of drives showing data written, lifetime prediction, etc.
Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Services
For important data, Seagate is offering a data recovery service insurance plan for all the drives. Purchased separately, plans start at 2-year for $30 and is tied to a single drive. During the period of coverage, you can make a claim to have your data recovered and once shipped, you’ll be updated above recovery status.
Performance Testing – Seagate FireCuda 510
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i9 9900K
Motherboard: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XI EXTREME
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3600 16GB
Storage: WD Blue SSD 1TB SATA (OS), Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
PSU: Seasonic Platinum 1050w
Cooling: Fractal Design Celsius S36 AIO Liquid cooler
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2475smhl-4K
VGA: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE
Potential Performance (ATTO Disk Benchmark)
ATTO Disk Benchmark benchmarks a drive’s read and write speeds with increasing file sizes and graphs them.
Anvil Storage Utilities
Anvil Storage Utilities is a disk benchmarking utility designed to offers a simpler method of scoring a storage device’s performance for both read and write as well as overall. The scores are presented in scores from the benchmark window.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmarks SSDs and provides a score. In our charts, we’ll show you the performance results instead. AS SSD uses synthetic read/write tests with selectable test size.
Crystal Disk Mark v6
Crystal Disk Mark is storage benchmarking software was developed by “hiyohiyo” of Japan, and is available for free. This benchmark measures sequential, and random read/write speeds of storage devices.
ez IOmeter
ezIOmeter is a user-friendly port of the popular IOmeter benchmark. IOmeter is a professional load testing tool for measuring storage performance for enterprise solutions.
Conclusion
As mentioned, Seagate is taking a safe approach in building their first high-performance SSD and that rewards them greatly with excellent performance, enough to rival more premium options from Taiwanese makers. The hard disk giant knows this is their new playground and the FireCuda 510 is a great addition to their storage port folio.
The Seagate FireCuda 510 is an enthusiast-level product offering great performance and benchmarks numbers were as expected. Still, outside of performance we would like to see a lot of improvements to be made. This is not a knock on the product but more a suggestion in aid of development which I believe would reflect your own opinion as well. A slim heatsink would’ve been nice and a more premium packaging as well. Still, Seagate seems confident enough with this product that it has a 5-year warranty. Most of the competitors offers 3-year, including Corsair.
Perhaps the most glaring critique would be the price, with plenty of Taiwanese brands happy to sell their NVMe SSDs at below Php10,000, its going to be tough for Seagate to contend with that. Still, from a quality standpoint, only Samsung and Seagate would probably be in the same playing field and their prices rival each other. It goes without saying though, that this is uncharted waters for Seagate and a price cut would make adoption so much more easier.
Price History
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That said, the Seagate FireCuda 510 is an excellent product performance-wise and there’s plenty of room to improve. The main selling points here are top-of-the-line performance and the big brand support from Seagate. If you’re looking for a high-performance NVMe SSD and would appreciate the 5-year warranty from Seagate, the FireCuda 510 is something to consider.
Seagate backs the FireCuda 510 with a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Performance Award!
Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB Price, Where to Buy and Comparison Products
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