Page 11 - Conclusion
The Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB is the company's flagship NVMe SSD that wants to run against the best of the best. Did it deliver as promised? Well, there are a few things we have to look at before we arrive at a conclusion. Starting with the specifications, the FireCuda 510 1TB offers downright insane write endurance at 1300TBW; this is by far the highest I have seen for any solid state drive here at APH Networks. At this rating, you will have a really hard time trying to wear it out unless you can write 712GB per day for five years straight. The FireCuda 510 also offers Tier 1 linear read and write speeds at 3450MB/s and 3200MB/s, respectively, both of which we were able to replicate in our benchmarks. In other tests, this SSD also excelled in general workload speed and was top notch in the ultra-heavy PCMark 8 Storage Consistency test. Color me impressed. Where the FireCuda 510 fell short against the best performance drives, however, were the medium workloads in Crystal Disk Mark and PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0's Advanced Disk Test, which I found strange. Compared against the venerable Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB, the FireCuda 510 1TB trades close punches for the most part, but where it falls short, it came closer to that of a value NVMe drive than a performance one. This does not make sense considering the Patriot Viper VPN100 does not exhibit these problems despite being built with nearly identical hardware. This leads me to believe its firmware is not fully optimized. For about $250 at press time, the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB comes with a five year warranty, which is excellent. However, you can buy the WD Black SN750 1TB for $20 cheaper and it generally performs better. To answer the question I proposed in the beginning of this review, the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB has the hardware to run against the best of the best, but it will take some work -- likely on the firmware side -- for it to win the game.
Seagate provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB packs some serious hardware to show off impressive numbers in both linear and heavy workloads and promises amazing write endurance, but somehow comes under-optimized in medium workloads.
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Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 9.0
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
