Seagate FireCuda 510 NVMe 1TB SSD Review

Seagate makes absolutely amazing SSD solutions for both internal and external drives. Seagate also makes incredible flash drives, such as the new FireCuda 510 internal SSD, set to take on Samsung’s EVO Plus in the NVMe SSD market.

The FireCuda 510 uses 64-layer 3D TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND and ships in $230 1TB and $400 2TB models. There’s 1MB of DRAM cache for every 1TB of memory, and the drive also employs some of the TLC as SLC for secondary caching.

Here are the main specs of the FireCuda 510:

Capacity	1TB, 2TB
Interface	PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3
Sequential read	Up to 3,450 MB/s
Sequential write	Up to 3,200 MB/s
Random read	Up to 620,000 IOPS
Random write	Up to 600,000 IOPS
NAND	3D TLC
Warranty	Five years
Endurance	1,300 TBW (1TB) 2,600 TBW (2TB)

To save you analysing countless graphs and diagrams, we have put our performance results right here. We have compared to the Samsung 970 Pro SSD for these tests and utilised several speed testing applications and collated averages below.

Sequential Read Speed
FireCuda 510: 3,354 MB/s
Samsung 970 Pro: 3,225 MB/s

Sequential Write Speed
FireCuda 510: 3,235 MB/s
Samsung 970 Pro: 2,750 MB/s

Impressively, the FireCuda 510 stands almost true to its claims, beating the advertised write speed and only just falling short of the advertised read speed. It did phenomenally and took the reigns over the Samsung Pro series.

We found the FireCuda to be better with large numbers of smaller files, as opposed to single files with large file sizes – but it does great regardless.

We tested copying a 50GB and a 500GB file, and around the 80-90% mark, the FireCuda dipped in performance, but nothing too serious to note. It dropped from its 1.8GB/s transfer rate down to around 1.1GB/s for a little while, but shot back up towards the end.

4K performance was also very impressive, with lightning quick speeds and processing times. The FireCuda does a great job in keeping up with high level tasks effortlessly.

One major selling point of this product is the warranty. Seagate, you’ve done it again. 5 years is absolutely exceptional for a product of this nature and we are impressed with Seagate continuing to provide market leading warranties on their products.

Overall, we found this product to work remarkably in the real world, taking on huge tasks. Processing was incredibly quick and gaming response time was improved thanks to its high speed. If you can manage with less than 2TB without external storage, then go for the FireCuda 510 and make it your one and only drive, it is exceptional and a noble competitor for Samsung and WD’s SSD’s.