Is this the upgrade your gaming PC deserves?

Seagate is looking to break into the high-performance NVMe SSD market with its new, gaming-focused FireCuda 510 NVMe SSD. This new product promises not only blisteringly fast read and write speeds, but long-lasting endurance as well.

PROS:

• Achieves close to advertised transfer speeds
• Long warranty

CONS:

• Expensive

Speed and endurance

With SSD prices dropping the past few months there’s never been a better time to upgrade your desktop or PC’s storage to an NVMe solution.

Seagate promises that their FireCuda 510 drive will deliver fast read and write speeds that won’t fail you. In fact, the drive has a 5-year warranty which theoretically will last you at least 1 PC upgrade cycle (assuming you replace parts every 3 or 4 years).

At its core, the FireCuda 510 is a 2280 (22mm wide and 80mm long) M.2 NVMe SSD drive that uses x4 PCIe Gen 3. The drive uses a 64-layer 3D TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND, with 1MB of DRAM cache for every 1TB of memory.

The drive is rated for a generous 1300TBW (terabytes written) for every 1TB of capacity, which exceeds the industry standard.

Seagate is offering the FireCuda 510 in two storage options: 1TB and 2TB, though pricing for either variant is steep, as we’ll get to later.

Brutally quick

Seagate advertises the FireCuda 510 as being capable of hitting Sequential Read speeds of 3450 MB/s (128KB) and Sequential Write speeds of 3200 MB/s (128KB), as well as hitting Random Read (IOPS) and Random Write (IOPS) speeds of 620K and 600K, respectively.

That’s quite higher than SSDs like Western Digital’s Black, which is advertised to hit only 3,400 MB/s sequential reads and 2,800 MB/s sequential writes.

Putting the two up against each other via CrystalDiskMark, The FireCuda 510 actually exceeded its advertised read speed, coming in at 3476.1 MB/s. Write speeds were a few points off of the advertised speeds, coming in at just 3054.9 MB/s.

That’s more than enough to ensure you load in faster when you’re playing singleplayer and multi-player matches when you’re gaming.

Verdict: Blistering performance, but only if you have deep pockets

Close to advertised speeds, 5-year warranty and higher than normal TBW guarantee – the FireCuda 510 looks to be the perfect, high-performance SSD for gamers. So what’s the catch?

Price – in the Philippines, the Seagate FireCuda 510 is priced at Php 12,499, which is pretty steep and almost double the price of competing NVMe SSDs available to consumers.

Then again if you’re looking at picking up the FireCuda 510, performance is your main metric of concern, not price. In that case it delivers on its promises in spades – just make sure you have a fat wallet.