Seagate FireCuda 530, 2 TB, Internal SSD, M.2 PCIe Gen4 ×4 NVMe 1.4, transfer speeds up to 7300 MB/s, 3D TLC NAND, 2550 TBW, Heatsink, for PS5/PC, 3 year Rescue Services (ZP2000GM3A023)

Product Information

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them. Design and specs

The drive is fairly standard in height to other m.2 NVMes, however, it is easy to forget that the micron NAND featured in the Firecuda 530 is significantly higher quality than many at 176L (something we will touch on later). The larger capacity Firecuda 530s drives at 2TB and 4TB feature double-sided NAND placement, resulting in both better capacity handling, performance and durability. However, this needs to be balanced against a larger heatsink/thermal pad application. In PC use, this is of little-to-no concern, but now the Firecuda 530 NVMe SSD is pretty much the ‘score-to-beat’ on PS5 SSD upgrades, this is an important consideration.Some Phison E18 equipped SSDs don’t come with any kind of management software, which can be a hindrance if you're hoping to clone your existing drive. Seagate includes a reskinned version of Acronis True Image which is easy to use. Seagate's SeaTools app also deserves a mention. It provides S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, health information, self-testing and erase functions among others. File transfer times were some of the most impressive I’ve seen in all my time testing SSDs, with particular highlights being with some of the biggest PS5 games. Horizon: Forbidden West, with its 99.35 GB file size, jumped from the internal storage to the NVMe SSD in just 1 minute and 19 seconds (or 79 seconds). Equally impressive is Death Stranding: Director’s Cut (69.35 GB), which transferred in only 54 seconds. That’s well over 1 GB/sec being more-than-enough to copy your entire game library over in just a few minutes. Alongside the controller and NAND, the Firecuda 530 features DD4 DRAM/memory. This scales in capacity alongside each storage tier of the series. Another interesting thing of note on the Seagate Firecuda 530 SSD drive physically is that regardless of whether you chooses the 500GB, 1TB, 2TB or 4TB, they ALL arrive at 2280 length. This is to be expected on the smaller capacities, but the 4TB in particular managing to hit that cap without resorting to a 22110 (without compromising the NAND storage to QLC etc) is impressive indeed. This does mean that the 2TB and 4TB model then need to be double-sided drives (something to factor in at the heatsink level on more compact PC and console systems like PS5) but never the less, only 2-3 brands including Seagate include a 4TB drive at this architecture and performance threshold. The PCIe 3 tests utilized Windows 10 64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (NVidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. It also contains a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card, and Softperfect Ramdisk 3.4.6 for the 48GB read and write tests. Overall, you really cannot fault the hardware inside/onboard the Seagate Firecuda 530, as it is still by far one of the highest performing sequential Read and Write drives in the market over many other M.2 NVMe PCIe 4 SSDs released in the last 6-8 months. Before we go into the full testing, however, it is worth taking a moment to look closely at the reported performance benchmarks of the Seagate Firecuda 530, as although the performance is good, there are areas such as IOPS and endurance when compared with its main rivals that make quite a stark contrast. Seagate Firecuda 530 SSD Review – Official Stats First

The Firecuda 530 arrives in a remarkably similar box to the Firecuda 520 and despite the obvious change in animal logo, it’s still going to be pretty easy to overlook what massively different drives these are in their architecture if seen on a shelf! Given that I’ve only ever used HDDs for the past 21 years, I’m looking forward to finally getting aboard the SSD-train in a few days. Alongside this controller, the NAND featured on the Seagate Firecuda 530 is quite a top-end choice too. As mentioned, the Phison E18 controller has been featured on a number of other solutions in the last 6+ months, however, the Firecuda 530 arrives with an extra advantage with Micron 176 layered 3D TLC NAND. This is very important, as this massive jump over the bulk of other SSDs that arrive with 96L NAND allows better-sustained performance through the drives lifetime and (more importantly) a MUCH higher endurance rating. With most other M.2 PCIe4 NVMe SSDs arriving with 0.3 or 0.38 drive writes per day, this one is rated at 0.7 DWPD. Even if you are not planning on hammered this drive daily, that only means this SSD NAND will last even longer and will in all likelihood massively outline whatever system it is installed within.The Seagate FireCuda 530 is currently the fastest NVMe SSD on the market. It not only bested the best of the rest in our real-world and synthetic benchmarks, it did so by a healthy marginin several tests. If you can afford it and you can find it, you won’t regret it.