Price When Reviewed

1TB/$189.99 I 2TB/$319.99

Best Prices Today: Seagate FireCuda 540 NVMe SSD

$179.99

You know the PCIe 5.0 NVMe market is choosing up when venerable storage vendor Seagate enters the fray. The firm’s new FireCuda 540 leverages the fifth-gen bus to show in excellent real-world efficiency.

It wasn’t fairly the measure of the Crucial T700 in different assessments, however it was shut and can be a bit extra inexpensive.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best SSDs to study competing merchandise.

Seagate FireCuda 540 specs and design

The 540 is a 2280 (22mm large, 80mm lengthy) M.2 sort using 4 lanes of PCIe 5.0 for transfers. The NAND is Micron’s B58R 232-layer TLC, and the controller is Phison’s PS5026-E26. It’s double-sided, however nonetheless skinny sufficient to improve most laptops.

The 540 is at the moment out there in 1TB/$189.99 and 2TB/$319.99 flavors, placing it on the excessive finish of the market, albeit a tad cheaper than Crucial’s top-rated T700 in a 2TB capability. Note that a number of the costs on Amazon on the time of this writing have been ridiculously increased than that, so….

Fair warning. Before official pricing is introduced, some unscrupulous on-line distributors cost excess of retail to reap the benefits of the over-anxious. Hold onto your horses and await actual pricing from the seller to indicate up before you purchase any laptop part.

Jon L. Jacobi

Seagate warranties the drive for 5 years and at 1TBW (terabytes written to the drive) for each terabyte of capability. That’s a really beneficiant TBW score, and the corporate additionally offers information rescue for 3 years ought to one thing monstrously evil befall the drive. Note that SSDs are actually so dependable, we’ve nearly forgotten what failure is like.

How does the Seagate FireCuda 540 carry out?

The 540’s efficiency was among the finest we’ve seen, however a combined bag with excessive highlights and a few “low” factors. The excellent news is that the drive set a report in our 48GB transfers, blasting its well past the earlier report holder—the PCIe 4.0, host reminiscence bus WD SN580. It additionally simply bested each of the PCIe 5.0 SSDs we’ve examined: the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10,000 and aforementioned Crucial T700.

The WD SN580 is included in these charts due to its stellar 48GB switch efficiency, and the truth that it’s a couple of third the price of the others.

Jon L. Jacobi

The “low” factors have been that FireCuda 540 misplaced to each PCIe 5.0 opponents by a hair within the artificial benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark 8 and AS SSD 2.0) and lagged significantly behind them within the 450GB write. Of course, these fifth-gen opponents have been each 2TB drives, whereas Seagate despatched us the 1TB model of the 540. That means much less secondary cache and slower occasions in that take a look at.

Jon L. Jacobi

The FireCuda additionally behaved a bit oddly through the 450GB write. Normally, we see the highest pace sustained till the secondary cache runs out, then a drop to the NAND’s native write pace (normally 250Mbps to 450Mbps). The 540 however began out at prime pace (over 3GBps), then a couple of quarter of the best way in dropped to round 1.7GBps and stayed there till the write was accomplished.

The general time was acceptable within the grand scheme, however not on par for fifth-gen, with the aforementioned caveat regarding capability.

Jon L. Jacobi

The solely different side of the FireCuda 540’s efficiency price mentioning is that it was only a bit gradual formatting. As you’ll doubtless solely do that as soon as (we reformat frequently throughout testing), that’s not one thing it’s best to ever fear about.

Should I purchase the Seagate FireCuda 540?

The FireCuda 540’s real-world efficiency with the 48GB transfers bodes nicely for the typical person, and it’s a bit cheaper in its 2TB incarnation than the Crucial T700. The excellent TBW score and information restoration make it a very good match for the typical person with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t inform you which you could get nearly the identical real-world efficiency for much, far much less. Some of the most recent HMB PCIe 4.0 designs such because the WD Blue SN580 listed within the charts or the Sabrent Rocket Q4 are additionally very quick at our 48GB transfers. Again, the previous is lower than one-third the worth of the FireCuda 540.

How we take a look at

Internal drive assessments at the moment make the most of Windows 11, 64-bit operating on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of reminiscence complete). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB of complete reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB which additionally runs the OS.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency will lower attributable to much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components.

Caveat: The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped and to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can and can fluctuate by capability attributable to extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND out there for secondary caching. Vendors additionally sometimes swap elements. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report, by all means, tell us.