While many companies are chasing top-end performance or great cooling to make the best PCIe 5.0 SSD, Seagate is after something else: endurance. Its FireCuda 540 SSD isn't the fastest among PCIe 5.0 drives, but at 1000TBW per terabyte, it's definitely the most durable by far. If you want an SSD that will last you years without even failing a little, the FireCuda 540 is the SSD for you.

About this review: Seagate sent us the FireCuda 540 2TB for the purposes of this review. Seagate did not see the contents of this review before publishing.

Source: Seagate

Seagate FireCuda 540 PCIe Gen5

The most durable M.2 SSD

PCIe 5.0 performance and excellent longevity

8 / 10

$181 $187 Save $6

Seagate's FireCuda 540 SSD is a first-generation PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive that boasts reads and writes of up to 10,000MB/s. However, it requires a heatsink, and since the FireCuda 540 doesn't come with one, you'll have to ensure your device has a built-in one you can use.

Storage capacity

1TB, 2TB

Hardware Interface

PCIe Gen 5 x4

Transfer rate

10,000/10,000MB/s Read/Write (2TB model)

TBW

2.000 (2TB model)

Pros

• Delivers much better max performance than PCIe 4.0 SSDs
• 1TB and 2TB models
• The highest endurance you can find on an SSD

Cons

• No heatsink model (yet)
• Not the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD

$339 at Amazon $181 at Newegg $190 at B&H

Seagate FireCuda 540 pricing and availability

At the time of writing, you can find the FireCuda 540 2TB for $300 and the 1TB for $180, though availability doesn't look perfect as on Amazon, you can only get the FireCuda 540 from third parties. One thing to note is that Seagate says the 1TB model is a little slower than the 2TB model, though, in this review, I only tested the 2TB model, so I can't say for sure if you really do need to worry about lower performance.

Furthermore, you won't be able to find the FireCuda 540 with a heatsink included, at least not yet. Seagate told me that it doesn't feel like this is a problem since virtually all motherboards with PCIe 5.0 support have heatsinks of their own, and I agree with that line of thinking. Still, it would be nice to have that option anyway, and hopefully, Seagate will eventually introduce a variant of the FireCuda 540 that comes with a custom heatsink. Like most PCIe 5.0 SSDs, since it requires a heatsink, it may not be ideal if you want to put it in a laptop.

How the Seagate FireCuda 540 was tested

For this review, I tested the FireCuda 540 in a test bench using Asus's B650E-I Strix, a Ryzen 9 7900X, and 32GB of G.Skill's Flare X5 DDR5 memory rated at 6,000MHz and CL36. Because the FireCuda 540 doesn't come with a heatsink, I tested it under the included heatsink that came with the motherboard, which isn't particularly large but is sufficient even for high-end SSDs.

In the benchmarks I ran (CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Disk Benchmark), I tested the FireCuda 540 and other SSDs in two different ways: with 100% free space and with 10% free space, as some SSDs lose performance when they get filled up with data. I also didn't run benchmarks back-to-back but instead waited about 10 to 15 minutes between runs in order to make sure I wasn't burning through cache and running into poor performance as a result. It is normal for power users to deplete an SSD's cache in real-world work, however.

The two SSDs I've chosen to compare the FireCuda 540 against are MSI's Spatium M570, a PCIe 5.0 drive that is priced similarly to the FireCuda 540, and Corsair's MP600 Pro NH, the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD you can buy today. These drives were tested under the same conditions with the same methodologies.

Performance

In CrystalDiskMark, I tested the four "default" and two "NVMe" benchmarks, which are half sequential and half random and use a variety of different block sizes and queue depths.

Scores are organized by read/write and are measured in MB/s.

With no data stored on these drives, the FireCuda 540 and Spatium M570 are pretty neck and neck, but a fairly significant gap emerges when you fill each drive to 90%. The Spatium M570 loses quite a bit of write performance in three of the six tests, and while reading is usually more important than writing, anybody doing lots of file transfers will inevitably notice how much faster the FireCuda 540 is. Random performance, however is mostly the same between the FireCuda 540 and the Spatium M570, which indicates both drives will perform about the same outside of large file transfers.

Of course, compared to a top-end drive like the MP600 Pro NH, the FireCuda 540 (as well as the Spatium M570) is much faster in sequential workloads. The MP600 Pro NH actually maintains a pretty sizable lead in the random Q32T1 test, but it's not so significant that it really changes anything for the FireCuda 540.

ATTO Disk Benchmark runs a series of sequential reads and writes at gradually increasing block sizes, and I tested it in its default configuration. It gives quite a few data points, from 512 bytes to 64MB, but I cut it off at 8MB, and I'm also only showing half of the data points between 512 bytes and 8MB just for the sake of brevity.

Scores are organized by read/write and are measured in MB/s.

There's really not that much difference between these three SSDs until we get to the 32KB mark, which is when the FireCuda 540 and Spatium M570 start to pull ahead of PCIe 4.0 drives like the MP600 Pro NH. Overall, the FireCuda and Spatium M570 were pretty similar, to the point that both SSDs showed similar inconsistency when filled to 90% capacity. However, neither drive was cripplingly inconsistent, and each only showed performance drops a few times throughout the benchmark.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs get really hot, and the FireCuda 540 is no exception, as it reached a peak of 86 C during my testing. That's higher than the 81 C observed on the Spatium M570, though this comparison isn't entirely fair since the FireCuda 540 was using a smaller heatsink. In that light, 86 C isn't a bad result, though hopefully, future PCIe 5.0 drives solve this heat problem.

Should you buy the Seagate FireCuda 540?

You should buy the Seagate FireCuda 540 if:

• You want a fast PCIe 5.0 SSD
• The SSD with the highest endurance available today

You shouldn't buy the Seagate FireCuda 540 if:

• You want an even faster PCIe 5.0 SSD
• High durability isn't that important to you

While I wasn't amazed by the FireCuda 450's performance (Crucial's T700 is seemingly the better SSD in that regard), the incredibly high endurance Seagate offers is impressive. At 2000TBW for the 2TB model, you would have to write 1TB of data to the FireCuda 540 for five and a half years before the drive would hit its limit. Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs offer just 700TBW per terabyte compared to the 1000TBW per terabyte on the FireCuda 540, putting the FireCuda 540 in a league of its own, even if this much endurance is overkill.

Although you need a motherboard with PCIe 5.0 to enjoy its high performance, you can still enjoy its endurance if you put it in a desktop that's limited to PCIe 4.0. In that sense, the FireCuda 540 isn't just a good PCIe 5.0 SSD but one of the best SSDs for anyone who values endurance and durability above all else. Perhaps targeting endurance makes the FireCuda 540 more niche than its competitors, but it is undeniably a winner nonetheless.

Source: Seagate

Seagate FireCuda 540 PCIe Gen5

Most durable M.2 SSD

8 / 10

$181 $187 Save $6

Seagate's FireCuda 540 SSD is a first-generation PCIe 5.0 M.2 drive that boasts reads and writes of up to 10,000MB/s. However, it requires a heatsink, and since the FireCuda 540 doesn't come with one, you'll have to ensure your device has a built-in one you can use.

$339 at Amazon $181 at Newegg $190 at B&H