Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB SSD Review

To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

We use the following folder/file types:

• 100GB data file.
• 60GB iso image.
• 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
• 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
• 12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
• 10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
• 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
• 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
• BluRay Movie – 42GB.
• 21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
• 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
• 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
• 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).

The Seagate FireCuda 530 handled our real-life file testing without displaying any real problems averaging 521MB/s writing the larger test files to the drive and 445MB/s when reading the data back again. The two slowest transfers were the 60GB Steam Folder (332MB/s write, 376MB/s read) and the 50GB file folder (234MB/s write, 314MB/s read).

To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:

Switching over to an all NVMe storage environment we see write speeds of over 2GB/s for ten out of the thirteen tests, averaging 2,875MB/s for the ten with the fastest being the 2,954MB/s for the 60GB iso transfer. Reading the data back, the same ten tests averaged 2,313MB/s, the fastest being the 2,644MB/s for the 8K Movie Scenes transfer test.

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