Seagate Firecuda 510 1TB Performance Internal Solid State Drive SSD PCIe Gen3 X4 NVMe 1.3 for Gaming PC Gaming Laptop Desktop - 3-year Rescue Service (ZP1000GM30011)

Pros: The Seagate ZP1000GM30011 (1 TB) is an extremely fast M.2 SSD using 3rd GEN PCIe interface. I bench marked this against a Corsair MP510 that is almost 2TB in size. For the testing I used CrystalDiskMark on a Windows 10 x64 system. Seagate ZP1000GM30011 (1TB) -------------------------------------------------------------- Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3468.881 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3125.871 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 586.406 MB/s [143165.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 524.853 MB/s [128137.9 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 2222.290 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 3152.058 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 51.666 MB/s [ 12613.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 175.905 MB/s [ 42945.6 IOPS] Corsair MP510 (2TB) -------------------------------------------------------------- Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3465.285 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1557.084 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 569.911 MB/s [139138.4 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 424.251 MB/s [103576.9 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1967.349 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 833.898 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 37.352 MB/s [ 9119.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 181.301 MB/s [ 44262.9 IOPS] The results show us a few things. First, the Seagate FireCuda is coming up very close to the advertised specs which is a very positive thing. Second, it beats the Corsair model in every category with the exception of sequential reading which is almost on par. The Corsair model failed to meet its write advertised specs but the Seagate model made all of its advertised specs (or very closely).

Cons: The price tag is very high when compared to other 1TB models from other manufacturers. You can pick up an M.2 around $100 with 1TB of storage that has very similar advertised specs. With this price tag of $199 some people may want to consider another brand for 2TB of storage as there are many just over the $200 mark.

Overall Review: It is a great drive and I am very happy it meets the specs advertised and it beat the performance of my Corsair MP510. Just not sure that slight extra speed is worth the less available space. My fear is the price point may be a bit too high. I took 1 egg off simply because the price point is off against competitors.

Pros: Reasonable cost, fast speeds, long lasting

Cons: I can find none

Overall Review: I normally go into transfer speeds r/w speeds but david posted similar to my results and I will say on my system they met all claimed. My system is based upon an I5-9600k at stock settings with RX-590 and 16g ram. I use only ssd's and 2 NVMe's So to the meat since about all systems boot fast now I will focus on gaming and specifically on large load games and for the two I chose Borderlands and Ghost Recon due to their load times. On both games loading and zoning on borderlands to times vs a standard ssd were as much as 30% faster than my ssd's and this one even beat my other NVMe by about 10% which I tested and retested even though very similar speeds and possibly that is due to newer design? If you are coming from a standard hd the difference is incredible and I know this from memories of when I swapped to ssd's from platter's. For gaming and loading large games these just make things so much better and will continue to make the wait much less stressful. My ssd's are from various years and So that is why my comment of as much as--- but rest assured there is a difference and on a few games like Far cry 5 I noticed a smoother game play and still wondered if it was in my mind so I had someone else try off each and they said they felt the same way and I had not told them which was which but we showed no difference in frame rates. If you are craving that little bit extra out of your system at a good price point I would suggest you take these into serious consideration and if need be buy an adapter.

Pros: I have been using Seagate drives for quite a few years. In fact, the first gaming PC I personally built had a 300 GB Barracuda hard drive. I've owned at least half a dozen of their drives over the years and the experience has been mostly positive. I have had one external drive fail, but it was covered under warranty. These days, solid state drives rule the enthusiast market. It seems like traditional hard drive manufacturers, including Seagate, were a little late to the party. However, with the introduction of the 510 series Fire Cuda M.2 NVMe SSD, Seagate is making it known they're still capable of making a blazing fast drive. All too often manufacturers only advertise maximum speeds, knowing their drives are only capable of performing at those speeds in short bursts. So you have to be careful when shopping for an SSD. I got the 1 TB capacity drive. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this SSD, but this Fire Cuda M.2 SSD is capable of maintaining speeds very close to what's advertised for extended durations. With this 510 series Fire Cuda drive, both the read and write speeds are exceptional. I don't have a lot of experience with M.2 SSDs, but I have been using a 1 TB 960 Evo M.2 for the past couple of years that I am able to compare it to. In every single benchmark, this drive destroys the 960 Evo. I am confident it would also outperform the 960 Pro and will definitely give the 970 series of SSDs a run for their money as well, and at a much lower price point. The primary difference between my old drive and this one is the write speeds are significantly higher. Read speeds are higher too, but write speeds are not only higher, they're more consistent with files of any size and over a much longer duration. I performed benchmarks comparing my two drives with multiple passes of file sizes between 1 and 16 GB. I used 3 different benchmarks, AS SSD, Crystal Disk Mark and Samsung Magician. I am using the most recent versions of each. I monitored temperatures during benchmarking and after several hours of activity, temperatures never rose to a point that I would be concerned about. I used AIDA64 to monitor the temperatures of my SSDs. Samsung Magician: 960 Evo Sequential Read: 2929 MB/s Sequential Write: 1812 MB/s Random Read: 363, 281 IOPS Random Write: 166,259 IOPS Fire Cuda Sequential Read: 3471 MB/s Sequential Write: 3045 MB/s Random Read: 470,703 IOPS Random Write: 434,082 IOPS AS SSD: (Note: Seq tests are file size of 10 GB, 4K are 1 GB) 960 Evo Seq. Read: 2807 MB/s Seq. Write: 1097 MB/s 4K Read: 43.6 MB/s 4K Write: 141.66 MB/s Access Time Read: .084 ms Access Time Write: .026 ms Fire Cuda Seq. Read: 2986 MB/s Seq. Write: 2884 MB/s 4K Read: 61.9 MB/s 4K Write: 163.4 MB/s Access Time Read: .027 ms Access Time Write: .020 ms Crystal Disk Mark: 960 Evo File Size 16 GB Seq Read: 2754 MB/s Seq Write: 1157 MB/s File Size 1 GB Seq Read: 2858 MB/s Seq Write: 1856 MB/s 4K 8QT8 Read: 1467 MB/s 4K 8QT8 Write: 1366 MB/s 4K 32Q1T Read: 709 MB/s 4K 32Q1T Write: 601 MB/s 4K 1Q1T Read: 48.8 MB/s 4K 1Q1T Write: 170.9 MB/s Fire Cuda 960 Evo File Size 16 GB Seq Read: 3471 MB/s Seq Write: 3054 MB/s File Size 1 GB Seq Read: 3467 MB/s Seq Write: 3062 MB/s 4K 8QT8 Read: 1667 MB/s 4K 8QT8 Write: 2969 MB/s 4K 32Q1T Read: 922 MB/s 4K 32Q1T Write: 835 MB/s 4K 1Q1T Read: 56.4 MB/s 4K 1Q1T Write: 284.3 MB/s

Cons: I have been thoroughly impressed with the performance of this SSD. Considering it's performance, this drive is at an extremely competitive price point, making it perfect for a gaming PC. Although, at this time, M.2 SSDs aren't really a budget friendly option for the average PC gamer. Putting them out of reach for the average PC builder who is more concerned with maximizing their frames per second, with system responsiveness taking a back seat. M.2 SSDs are typically not very high in capacity, making them less than ideal as the sole data drive for the modern gaming PC. With many recent games exceeding 100 GB each, it limits the number of games you can have installed at any one time. Skip the rest of the cons section if you're not interested in a story about troubleshooting my SSD install problems. When I installed this drive I did run into a bit of trouble, although it's primarily a problem with Windows. When I first started testing, I just wanted to install this drive as a secondary data drive. My system specs: i9 9900K @ 5.4 GHz 32 GB DDR4 4000 MHz SLI RTX 2080 Ti Z390 Dark Windows 10 My mother board has two accessible M.2 slots between PCI-E slots 1 and 2. It also has two U.2 slots that share bandwidth with one of those slots if they're populated. With a Z series mother board and a standard i7 or i9 CPU, you're limited to 16 PCI-e lanes from the CPU. Since I'm running SLI I can't afford to lose any PCI-e lanes or SLI won't work. This Fire Cuda M.2 SSD operates natively on a PCI-e 3.0 x4 interface. I already had one of my M.2 slots populated, so I wasn't sure how the board would react when I installed another M.2 SSD. I was worried the chipset of my Z390 wouldn't have any additional PCI-e lanes available and would draw from the CPU. Looking back, that would be a major design flaw, but I seem to recall that's how some older Z series boards worked. If more mother boards would make use of a PLX chip, PCI-e lanes wouldn't be an issue anymore. My previous board, the z270x Gaming 9 had a PLX chip and it was awesome. SLI at x16/x16 and enough PCI-e lanes for all the available M.2 slots. So I installed the new M.2 SSD and booted up. In BIOS, everything was showing perfect. PCI-e x16 slots 1 and 2 both still at x8 3.0 speed and it sees the new SSD. But when I booted to Windows, SLI wasn't working, it was seeing one of my graphics cards as x8 at 1.1 gen speed and it's not showing my new SSD. Well, it turns out I didn't seat my SLI bridge tightly enough, that's why SLI wasn't working. And I had to go into Disc Management, where the drive was listed as Not Initialized. So I had to initialize the drive, assign it a letter, format it and create a partition on it before Windows would list it as available to use. I'm not surprised it needed to be formatted, that's pretty much standard procedure. But not even showing the drive as being available, just because it wasn't formatted is something that's new to Windows 10. Previous versions of Windows would show the drive immediately and ask if I wanted to format it if I tried to use it. Windows 10 has changed so much since launch, that some troubleshooting guides aren't entirely accurate anymore. Meaning that solving this problem was a bit time consuming. However that is the most important tool in any PC builders arsenal, the ability to troubleshoot.

Overall Review: With the extremely impressive write speeds of this Fire Cuda SSD, it makes it absolutely perfect for the content creator who wants to capture high resolution gaming at the native quality and frame rate. I was an early adopter of 4K. As soon as the first reasonably priced 4K monitor was available in the US, I had it preordered. I wanted to post videos on YouTube of the incredible quality 4K gaming had to offer, but at that time there was one major limiting factor, the data write speed of my hard drive. I had one of the fastest hard drives money could buy at that time and it wasn't even close to fast enough. So I upgraded to RAID 0 SSDs and they still weren't fast enough for native 4K at 60 fps. With the blazing fast write speeds of this SSD, it won't have any trouble with that whatsoever. The primary benefit of any quality M.2 SSD is system responsiveness. The days of sitting and waiting for your system to boot up are over. With this M.2 SSD, your system is ready to go as fast as it can turn on and there's no waiting, ever. Well, there are still some things that will make you wait a bit, but it won't be because your storage drive is a major bottleneck like it was in the days of mechanical hard drives. For the performance it offers, the price point of this drive is absolutely excellent. Just two years ago, when I bought my 960 Evo, it cost double what this drive is selling for at the time of this review. The Seagate 510 series Fire Cuda M.2 SSD is faster than many drives that are much more expensive. At this time, this drive can hang with the best of M.2 SSDs available. I really don't have anything negative to say about this drive specifically. It comes with a 5 year warranty. I typically don't keep many PC components that long as I tend to upgrade every 2 years. That's still an excellent warranty for any SSD and gives the buyer peace of mind. The Seagate 510 Series Fire Cuda M.2 NVMe SSD exceeded all of my expectations, 5 Eggs, very highly recommended.

Pros: It's fast (supposedly)

Cons: None really. It was a little expensive before PCIE Gen4 came out. Now it's cheaper.

Overall Review: If you run a hard drive read/write benchmark this will live up to the specs. In practice however it seems slower for various tasks, probably based on real world bottlenecks. If you want to copy from one drive to another, the slower drive speed takes priority so this thing could be lightning fast and it wouldn't matter. Games load quickly, but tech reviewers show that most NVMe drives don't get utilized very well by games in 2019. Maybe that will change, but for the time being these are just convenient due to form factor and lack of cabling.

Pros: crazy fast insanely fast cool firecuda logo sticker looks nice in the case

Cons: no cons bios recognized it immediately

Overall Review: this thing is fast i put my OS on here and my pc takes no longer than 15-30 second to go from Psu off to me being able to start up my discord lol when i boot up

Pros: - Fast - Easy Install - No problems yet

Cons: - None so far

Overall Review: I highly recommend this m.2 to all of my friends just on the performance it provides at the price point. I haven't had any issues with it so far to run my OS and a few select games. All in all I am impressed and will probably utilize this in the future.

Pros: Great Speed High Capacity (2TB) Seems to run cool so far, and mine is installed in lower m2 socket of an MSI MPG390 motherboard (below the video card when mounted vertically)

Cons: None that I am aware of. ( maybe seeing what the price of this or similar drives will be in a year or so, but that's Moore's Law for you!)

Overall Review: Like ALL m2 drives, you need the screw specific to your motherboard. (most motherboards come with one or two, and you can even buy a pack of 6 here on newegg. A wise investment) Make sure you do your research first and have the screw ready when you want to install.

Pros: - Quality - Nice packaging - Fit factor

Cons: - None

Overall Review: - A+