Seagate has finally realized that SSDs are the future, and that demand in this new market (for them) is high. That's why the company is putting all its weight behind flash storage, which has replaced mechanical hard drives for most of our readers. Announced earlier at CES this year, the FireCuda 510 uses the fast NVMe 1.3 protocol with a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface to bring you the transfer rates you're looking for.

Internally, Seagate has chosen to pair Toshiba 64-layer TLC flash with 1 GB of DDR4 DRAM and a PS5012 controller from Phison. The controller has been rebranded as "Seagate", which hints at the company having added some optimizations of their own and could explain why the drive is showing such outstanding sequential price performance. We measured 2.7 GB/s sequential writes at realistic queue depths of 1 to 4, which is the best of all SSDs we've tested. Other synthetics are good, too; for example, random writes reach the 3rd best result. Reads end up a bit slower, but with 2.5 GB/s, they're still mighty impressive.

When looking at real-life performance we see the drive excel in workloads that write a lot of data in a short time; in read-heavy tests it's slightly behind the top SSDs. Overall performance ended up in the upper segment of the tested NVMe drives, similar to the Team Group MP34, Intel 760p, and Samsung 950 Pro. The fastest drives in our test group are up to 4% faster, which is very little, especially when you're not taking stopwatch timings.

The write cache of the FireCuda 510 is decently sized at 28 GB, larger than most of the competition. I still would have wished for a bit more, especially on a 1 TB drive, maybe 40–60 GB as that would be able to soak up larger write bursts, too. When looking at sustained write performance, the FireCuda 510 does very well. On average, it writes data at 1 GB/s, which is better than every single other TLC drive we tested with the exception of the ADATA SX8200 Pro.

Seagate optimized the thermal behavior of their SSD very well despite the lack of a heatsink. When heavily loaded with zero airflow around it, we do see some slowdowns, but they are very well behaved. While other drives will drop performance to terrible speeds immediately, the FireCuda gradually slows down transfers once it passes a certain thermal threshold. This is actually a very smart approach as it ensures you retain best performance for as long as possible. What's a bit surprising is how inaccurate SMART temperature reporting is. We measured 95°C surface temperature when the drive reported it was running at 72°C.

Priced at $170 for the 1 TB version, the FireCuda is not unreasonably positioned for today's market conditions. I still think it's a little bit expensive as you can get similarly performing drives for less. To disrupt current market structures and establish itself as leader, Seagate will have to bring the FireCuda 510 pricing down to $150 or below. For example, the ADATA SX8200 Pro and Team Group MP34 are $150. On the other hand, Samsung is charging $170 for the 970 EVO and $200 for the EVO Plus—too expensive—and WD's drives have gotten expensive, too. If you are willing to go for QLC, the Crucial P1 at $100 for 1 TB can't be beat, but it has far worse write performance due to the use of QLC flash. What's also speaking for the FireCuda 510 is that it comes with a five-year warranty, and the fact that Seagate has decades of experience in the storage industry, so their support and RMA handling is topnotch.