PC World - USA (2019-07)

76 PCWorld JULY 2019

REVIEWS

IMAGE: SEAGATE

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This SSD was scintillantly fast, but dropped to merely good in one test. BY JON L. JACOBI

Seagate ran some pretty

impressive performance

numbers by me before I had

an actual chance to test the

company’s new FireCuda 510 NVMe SSD. I’m

happy to report that the drive lived up to the

hype and then some—except for one test that

has us scratching our heads.

FEATURES AND SPECS

The FireCuda 510 is a 2280 (22 mm wide, 80

mm long) M.2 NVMe SSD that can make full

use of the x4 PCIe generation 3 (8Gbps). The

next generation of 16Gbs PCIe 4.0 products

were announced at Computex, which may

alter the equation a bit for early adopters and

other bleeding-edge NVMe SSD purchasers.

Look for an article on that soon.

The FireCuda 510 uses 64-layer 3D TLC

(Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) NAND and ships in

$230 1TB and $400 2TB flavors. There’s 1MB

of DRAM cache for every 1TB of memory, and

the drive also employs some of the TLC as SLC

for secondary caching. Nicely, the drive

carries a five-year warranty and is rated for a

very generous 1300TBW for every 1000GB

of capacity. Any time the TBW (TerraBytes

Written) rating exceeds capacity (times 1000),

it’s a very good thing.

PERFORMANCE

The FireCuda 510 absolutely aced

CrystalDiskMark 6 and AS SSD, and did very

well in all the copy tests. In fact, it scored the