Seagate FireCuda 540 Gen5 SSD review: Great real-world chops, and peace of mind

Price When Reviewed

1TB/$189.99 I 2TB/$319.99

Best Prices Today: Seagate FireCuda 540 NVMe SSD

You know the PCIe 5.0 NVMe market is selecting 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 exams, however it was shut and can also be a bit extra reasonably priced.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best SSDs to find out about competing merchandise.

Seagate FireCuda 540 specs and design

The 540 is a 2280 (22mm vast, 80mm lengthy) M.2 kind 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 present 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 had been ridiculously greater than that, so….

Fair warning. Before official pricing is introduced, some unscrupulous on-line distributors cost way over retail to reap the benefits of the over-anxious. Hold onto your horses and look forward to actual pricing from the seller to point out up before you purchase any laptop element.

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 knowledge rescue for 3 years ought to one thing monstrously evil befall the drive. Note that SSDs are actually so dependable, we’ve virtually 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 document in our 48GB transfers, blasting its well beyond the earlier document 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 few third the price of the others.

Jon L. Jacobi

The “low” factors had 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 had 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 in the course of the 450GB write. Normally, we see the highest velocity sustained till the secondary cache runs out, then a drop to the NAND’s native write velocity (often 250Mbps to 450Mbps). The 540 however began out at prime velocity (over 3GBps), then a few quarter of the best way in dropped to round 1.7GBps and stayed there till the write was accomplished.

The total 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 value mentioning is that it was only a bit sluggish formatting. As you’ll seemingly solely do that as soon as (we reformat regularly throughout testing), that’s not one thing it is 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 knowledge restoration make it an excellent match for the typical person with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t inform you that you would be able to get virtually the identical real-world efficiency for a lot, far much less. Some of the newest 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 exams at present 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 whole). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch exams make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB of whole 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 on account of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements.

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