Introduction

Seagate is one the most well-known names in the storage industry, and their hard drives are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Together with Western Digital, Seagate basically owns the market for mechanical hard drives, but that market is under attack from flash-based SSDs. SSDs achieve faster transfer rates and lower access times than hard drives because of their solid-state nature without any moving parts. On the other hand, the price per GB for SSDs is higher than with HDDs, but prices have been steadily coming down over the years, which is now driving more and more budget-minded people into exploring what SSDs can offer over mechanical drives.

Today, we are reviewing the Seagate FireCuda 510 SSD, which was announced at CES this year. The drive uses the M.2 form factor with support for NVMe 1.3 over the fast PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface. Under the hood, the FireCuda 510 uses a Seagate flash controller which is actually a rebranded Phison PS5012—a model with a good track record we've seen on several other SSDs before.

Seagate has paired their controller with 1 TB of 3D TLC NAND flash from Toshiba, and 1 GB of DDR4 DRAM for the SSD controller's mapping tables. The FireCuda 510 is available in capacities of 500 GB (unknown), 1 TB ($170, this review), and 2 TB ($340). Endurance is rated at 650 TB, 1.3 PB, and 2.6 PB respectively.