Seagate is a name that is not strange at all to gamers from the past to now with many HDD product lines in the computer kit. However, this company entered the SSD a bit late compared to other NSXs on the market, so it rarely appears in high-end gaming PCs. But things seem to be different with the arrival of the newly launched FireCuda 530, gamers.
According to the published parameters from NSX, the Seagate FireCuda 530 belongs to the Seagate Gaming series and high-end segment with the PCIe Gen4 x4 connection standard for the highest bandwidth and speed currently available. The SSD will help gamers have a dizzyingly fast loading experience of games and software. Of course, the work experience or data copying will also be extremely smooth.
This SSD impresses right from the packaging with full books, and also gives a sticker for gamers to stick everywhere. This is relatively rare among solid-state drive products.
The version I experienced here is the Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB with the memory chips evenly divided on 2 sides of the main board. The front is black stamped with FireCuda branding, and the back is more specific information about this SSD.
Peeling off the sticker, we can see more clearly the components mounted on it. The front features a Seagate STXZY01049E0 controller chip, which has been optimized by the company from the Phison PS5018-E18 chip. Add to that the SK Hynix H5AN8G6NCJR-VKC 8Gb DDR4-2666 cache, the Phison PS6108-22 power processor and most importantly, four Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NANDs.
The back is similar, but only the memory chip and cache are left, meaning that each 4 NAND will use its own cache to help the SSD operate more stable.
It is known that the Micron 176-layer NAND memory chip provides very impressive performance with 35% higher read and write performance compared to the old generation Micron 96-layer NAND. This helps Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB deliver significantly higher speeds.
Going into the real test with CrystalDiskMark software we will get the speed shown in a more intuitive way. Each time I tested the Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB on a different system, the results were slightly different.
The first is with AMD systems:
Next is the Intel platform:
It can be seen that the speed of the Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB is very fast in both sequential and random read and write, completely meeting the needs of gaming as well as normal data copying.
In terms of temperature, through a bit of ‘torture’ process, the SSD reached the highest temperature of 60 degrees Celsius in room temperature about 20 degrees Celsius. With hotter weather, it will certainly increase further. and can go up to more than 70 degrees Celsius. The arrangement of memory chips on both sides makes heat dissipation methods difficult when we can only place the contact surface on the top, fortunately this is where the controller is located should not be much of a problem.
Next will be the game load test with Final Fantasy XIV EndWalker, we have a total load time of the Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB screen of 9.5 seconds, a tearing speed.
Overall, the Seagate FireCuda 530 is a high-end SSD that is very suitable for gamers who require high performance with impressive speeds. Note that the product can only achieve the highest performance on motherboards using the Nvme PCIe Gen4 x4 port, upgrading on the old platform will certainly not bring the expected speed.