Seagate Firecuda 510 Nvme Ssd: Very Fast Almost All The Time

This SSD was scintillantly fast, but dropped to merely good in one test.

- Jon L. Jacobi

Seagate ran some pretty impressive performance numbers by me before I had an actual chance to test the company’s new FireCuda 510 NVMe SSD. I’m happy to report that the drive lived up to the hype and then some—except for one test that has us scratching our heads.

FEATURES AND SPECS

The FireCuda 510 is a 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) M.2 NVMe SSD that can make full use of the x4 PCIe generation 3 (8Gbps). The next generation of 16Gbs PCIe 4.0 products were announced at Computex, which may alter the equation a bit for early adopters and other bleeding-edge NVMe SSD purchasers. Look for an article on that soon.

The FireCuda 510 uses 64-layer 3D TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND and ships in $230 1TB and $400 2TB flavors. 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. Nicely, the drive carries a five-year warranty and is rated for a very generous 1300TBW for every 1000GB of capacity. Any time the TBW (TerraBytes Written) rating exceeds capacity (times 1000), it’s a very good thing.

PERFORMANCE