Seagate FireCuda 520N 1TB SSD Review

The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.

The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.

Traces used:

Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until the main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).

Seagate's FireCuda 520N handles the stress of PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark pretty well. It averaged 190MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being the 225MB/s for the startup test trace of Adobe Acrobat followed very closely by the Premiere Pro trace at 224MB/s. For the Adobe usage traces it averaged 394MB/s for the five tests, with the fastest being the 894MB/s for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace.

The drive averaged 536MB/s for the three gaming test traces, the fastest being Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 at 692MB/s, followed by Battlefield V at 611MB/s and finally Overwatch at 308MB/s. When it came to the file transfer traces, the drive averaged 1,476MB/s for the six tests with the fastest being the cp1 write test at 3,797MB/s.

The 1TB Seagate FireCuda 520N produces an overall bandwidth figure for the benchmark of 393.01MB/s which sees the drive in the bottom half of the results chart.

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