Below I tested 4 different games on the Playstation 5, with each game being stored on the m.2 SSD expansion slot populated with the Seagate Firecuda 530. In three out of four cases, the game loaded 1 Sec + faster on the Seagate: Before we conduct our own testing on this SSD, Let’s take a closer look at the reported specifications and benchmarks first. The Seagate Firecuda 530 SSD arrives in four capacities at 500GB,1TB, 2TB and 4TB. The Prices currently are a little inconsistent (with each higher capacity tier actually having a higher price per GB – quite unusual) likely due to the hardware shortages, the Pandemic, Chia has affected SSD availability in the last 12 months and most recently the announcement that PS5 supports this SSD and it has increased the current price of most models around 20%! Below is a breakdown of how each Firecuda 530 SSD compares: Drive 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. For the most part, I DO think Seagate has succeeded in fulfilling the promises they have made on the Firecuda 530 and have arguably released the best example of m.2 PCIe4 NVMe SSD architecture you can buy in 2021. There is no avoiding the fact that the Seagate Firecuda 530 series of SSDs have arrived on the market noticeably later than their biggest rivals AND with a higher price tag, so they were going to need to make a pretty good early impression to make up the ground amply covered by their competitors. The decision to focus heavily on endurance and durability is a remarkably mature one (and potentially controversial one against their competitors) in an age when consumers are demanding prices come down, forcing brands to either cut covers where they think they will be felt the least or going the budget router of QC NAND. Therefore you have to respect Seagate’s decision to draw a line in the sand here about what they consider a high-end SSD. Though some buyers might not be as thrilled to pay for these extras that they feel they won’t need, the Firecuda 530 is still pretty much the score to beat in 1TB above, though the 500GB whilst maintaining the price structure of larger drives, might leave you a little less impressed. Overall, I can definitely recommend the Firecuda 530 series, but maybe pay the extra and go for the 1TB at the very least. Drive 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.

The Seagate FireCuda 530 (2TB) is the fastest NVMe SSD we’ve tested; it has a very high TBW rating for a consumer drive; and it also carries a five-year guarantee with three years of data recovery coverage. It isn’t cheap, but it’s the best thing out there. Apart from the PCMark 10 storage tests, the FireCuda 530 either matches or beats the big bois of the storage world, and when you add its leading sequential performance and endurance rating, the Seagate 530 is at least the equal of any consumer SSD on the market. 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.

Firmwaredownloads

As mentioned (about a million times, I know) the Firecuda 530 features M.2 PCIe4 architecture, arriving in NVMe 1.4 revision. This is an important detail as, although there are currently a large number of PCIe4 M.2 SSDs on the market, some are using older revisions. This can be updated in some cases, but it is by no means consumer-friendly/universal. The PC Tests of the Seagate Firecuda 530 500GB SSD included ATTO Diskbench Mark, CrystalDisk, AS SSD and spikes of AJA Disk Speed Test (over time). Seagate Firecuda 530 500GB – 1GB Test 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 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.

Overall, the Seagate Firecuda 530 was certainly able to provide some solid read performance, though clearly the fact this review features the 500GB drive has undermined the write activity. I am fully confident that larger capacity testing (coming soon) will live up to their respective reported benchmarks, as well as potentially exceed the test figures here on a more powerful machine. 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).When testing the Seagate Firecuda 530, I wanted to perform a good balance of consumer-accessible tests. So the results below come from testing this 500GB SSD on a PC system and loading game tests from a PS5 system (for those considering this SSD for a console gaming system). The first very clear thing is that the performance clearly scales quite hugely as you go through each capacity tier. The 500GB model features a rather underwhelming 3000GB sequential write compared with the more than double 6,000MB/s and 6,900MB/s reported on the rest of the series, but the sequential read performance of all capacities is still reported at 7,000MB/s (with a peak of 7,300MB/s at the highest end). Likewise, the 4K IOPS scales noticeably through the tiers, with the 500GB being the only version that does not break the 1,000,000 IOPS rating. Understandably this is an architecture/physical NAND scale limitation, but it definitely worth highlighting, as many buyers who are looking at the Seagate Firecuda 530 series and are somewhat intimidated by the higher price tag over other M.2 PCIe4 NVMe SSDs (but still want the endurance and durability of use) might scale to the 500GB model and then be unaware they are getting a very different ‘write’ experience. That said, modern PC and console gamers who are going to use the Seagate Firecuda 530 are going to largely need to focus on Read activity. For a better understanding of the most commonly used terms in the word of SSDs, take a moment to watch my video below that breaks down all of the most complex and repeated terms and anacronyms into plain, chewable English!