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

This PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD from Seagate was aces in our 48GB transfers and is a bit more affordable than the competition.

- JON L. JACOBI

You know the PCIe 5.0 NVMe market is picking up when venerable storage vendor Seagate enters the fray. The company's new FireCuda 540 (fave.co/ 3NGK17K) leverages the fifth-gen bus to turn in outstanding real-world performance.

It wasn't quite the measure of the Crucial T700 (fave.co/3JVrNhl) in other tests, but it was close and is also a bit more affordable.

SPECS AND DESIGN

The 540 is a 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) M.2 type utilizing four lanes of PCle 5.0 for transfers. The NAND is Micron's B58R 232layer TLC, and the controller is Phison's PS5026-E26. It's double-sided, but still thin enough to upgrade most laptops.

The 540 is currently available in 1TB/$189.99 and 2TB/$319.99 flavors, putting it at the high end of the market, albeit a tad cheaper than Crucial's top-rated T700 in a 2TB capacity. Note that some of the prices on Amazon at the time of this writing were ridiculously higher than that, so....

Fair warning. Before official pricing is announced, some unscrupulous online vendors charge far more than retail to take advantage of the overanxious. Hold your horses and wait for real pricing from the vendor to show up before you buy any computer component.

Seagate warranties the drive for five years and at 1TBW (terabytes written to the drive) for every terabyte of capacity. That's a very generous TBW rating, and the company also provides data rescue for three years should something monstrously evil befall the drive. Note that SSDs are now so reliable, we've almost forgotten what failure is like.