In one look
Expert rating
Benefits
- Excellent performer
- Slightly cheaper than PCIe 5.0 competition
- Excellent TBW rating and guaranteed
The inconvenients
- Slightly slow at our 450GB write
- No 4TB option
Our opinion
While not the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD we’ve seen with synthetic benchmarks, Seagate’s FireCuda 540 took first place in our actual 48GB transfers. That makes it a top pick.
You know the PCIe 5.0 NVMe market is picking up when venerable storage vendor Seagate enters the fray. The company’s new FireCuda 540 leverages the fifth-generation bus to deliver exceptional real-world performance.
It wasn’t quite the measure of the Crucial T700 in other tests, but it was close and it’s also a bit more affordable.
Further reading: Check out our roundup of the best SSDs to learn more about competing products.
Design, specifications and price
The 540 is an M.2 2280 type (22mm wide, 80mm long) using four lanes of PCIe 5.0 for transfers. The NAND is Micron’s B58R 232-layer TLC and the controller is Phison’s PS5026-E26. It’s double-sided, but still thin enough to upgrade most laptops.
The 540 is currently available in 1TB/$189.99 and 2TB/$319.99 versions, putting it at the high end of the market, although a bit cheaper than Crucial’s top-rated T700 in a capacity of 2 TB. You can buy it on Amazon and Andorama.
In the UK, the price is £210.90 for 1TB and £364.90 for 2TB. You can order it from Amazon UK, CCL and Box.
fair warning. Before official prices are announced, some unscrupulous online sellers charge far more than retail to take advantage of the most anxious. Hold on to your horses and wait for the real seller’s price to appear before buying a computer component.
Jon L. Jacobi
Seagate guarantees the drive for five years and at 1 TBW (terabytes written to disk) for each terabyte of capacity. That’s a very generous TBW rating, and the company also provides data rescue for three years if anything monstrously evil happens to the drive. Note that SSDs are now so reliable that we have almost forgotten what failure looks like.
Performance
The 540’s performance was one of the best we’ve seen, but a mixed bag with extreme highs and a few “low” points. The good news is that the drive set a record in our 48GB transfers, surpassing the previous record holder, the PCIe 4.0, WD SN580 host memory bus. In the same test, it also easily beat the other two PCIe 5.0 SSDs we tested: the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10,000 and the aforementioned Crucial T700.
The WD SN580 is included in these graphics because of its excellent 48GB transfer performance and the fact that it costs about a third of the cost of others.
Although the Seagate FireCuda 540 was well behind the T700 in CrystalDisMark 8, it was competitive with the Gigabyte.
Jon L. Jacobi
The “low” points were that FireCuda 540 lost out a bit to its two PCIe 5.0 competitors in synthetic benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark 8 and AS SSD 2.0) and lagged significantly behind them in writing 450 GB. Of course, these Fifth-gen competitors were both 2TB drives, while Seagate sent us the 1TB version of the 540. That means less secondary cache and slower times in this test.
Seagate provides a very generous TBW rating and also provides data backup for three years should anything monstrously evil happen to the drive.
The Seagate FireCuda 540 beat the competition in our 48GB transfers.
Jon L. Jacobi
The FireCuda also behaved a bit oddly while writing 450 GB. Normally we see the maximum speed maintained until the secondary cache runs out, then a drop in the native write speed of the NAND (typically 250 Mbps to 450 Mbps). The 540, on the other hand, started out at max speed (over 3 GB/s), then about a quarter of the way down to about 1.7 GB/s and stayed there until the writing is complete.
Overall time was acceptable in the grand scheme, but not on par with the fifth-gen, with the aforementioned caveat about capacity.
The Seagate FireCuda 540 didn’t do particularly well in writing 450GB. That’s at least partly because it’s a 1TB drive while the other two PCIe 5.0 drives were 2 TB with more secondary cache.
Jon L. Jacobi
The only other facet of FireCuda 540 performance worth mentioning is that it was just a bit of a slow format. Since you’ll probably only do this once (we continually reformat during testing), you should never worry about it.
Should I buy the Seagate FireCuda 540?
The actual performance of the FireCuda 540 with 48GB transfers bodes well for the average user, and it’s a bit cheaper in its 2TB incarnation than the Crucial T700. The TBW rating and exceptional data recovery make it a good choice for the average user with a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot.
However, I would be remiss if I didn’t let you know that you can get nearly the same real-world performance for much, much less. Some of the latest PCIe 4.0 HMB models such as the chart-listed WD Blue SN580 or the Sabrent Rocket Q4 are also very fast at our 48GB transfers. Again, the former costs less than a third of the price of the FireCuda 540.
How we test
Internal drive tests are currently using Windows 11, 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 processor combination with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB total memory). 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built into the rear panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48 GB transfer tests use an ImDisk RAM disk occupying 58 GB of the 64 GB of total memory. The 450 GB file is transferred from one Samsung 990 Pro 2TB which also runs the operating system.
Each test is performed on a newly formatted drive and TRIM so that the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance decreases due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors.
Caution: The performance figures shown apply only to the drive shipped to us and the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips for shotgun reads/writes and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a significant discrepancy between the performance you feel and the performance youth reportby all means, let us know.
Table of Contents
