The first Seagate PCIe gen 5 SSD, FireCuda 540, is incoming and we know because Amazon and another etailer leaked the details before Seagate had announced the drive.
Tom’s Hardware first noticed the offending webpages at Amazon UK and B&H, which were soon were closed down. Cue red faces in Seagate’s online sales department. We have asked the company to comment.
Seagate’s FireCuda products – such as its FireCuda 530 and 520 and 510 – are gaming SSDs in the M.2 gumstick format. The higher the product number, the newer and faster the drive. A table shows the progression, and has the 540’s details, such as we know, added:
The controller is assumed to be Phison’s PS5026 E26 product as Phison has announced a demo PCIe gen 5 SSD using it, and Seagate has a strong history of using Phison controllers for its FireCuda drives.
The 540 is half as fast again in terms of IOPS as the 530, with random read/write IOPS listed at up to 1,500,000. The sequential read/write bandwidth is given as up to 10GBps, a 37 percent increase on the 530’s maximum sequential read number.
An Apacer PCIe gen 5 gaming SSD uses the same Phison controller to achieve 13GBps sequential reads and 12GBps sequential writes. So too does Gigabyte’s Aorus Gen5 10000 SSD, supporting PCIe 5 and with 200-plus layer 3D NAND in 1, 2 and 4TB M.2 2280 format. It delivers 1.3 million/1.16 million random read/write IOPS and 12.5/10.1GBps sequential read/write bandwidth. The FireCuda looks a tad light on the sequential bandwidth front.
The 2TB 540 is rated at 2,000 TB written endurance during its five-year warranty period, with the 4TB model reaching 3,949 TB written. The etailer webpages said the drive has a graphene heat-spreader instead of a heat sink. The US price for the 1TB version is $189.99 and the 2TB 540 is $319.99.
