Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1Tb PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe

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Crucial’s T700 is not the first or only SSD to use the Phison E26 controller, but it currently outperforms the competition thanks to the latest and fastest NAND memory chips from Micron (Crucial is a Micron subsidiary). The magic ingredient appears to be its 232-layer NAND from Micron, which is able to propel this drive all the way to the top of several benchmark charts versus other Gen4 drives. We have recently observed the same trend even in DRAM-less SSDs like the impressive Teamgroup MP44, but the Crucial T500 does employ an LPDDR4 DRAM buffer that gives it an edge in many workloads.

Pcie 4.0 is faster, about double that of pcie 3.0, or 16 Gbits/sec for a by 4 link which boils down to approx 8,000 Mega Bytes per second (theoretically) Another detail worth noting is that, much like the FireCuda 530, you have to opt for the 2TB or 4TB models to get the best possible performance. These copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. While at first these numbers might look low compared to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, that's due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of and differences between the source data. If you're regularly moving files around on your drive from one folder to another, this test is a handy relative throughput measure.A somewhat surprising addition to the list of top performers is the Phison E25-based is the new (as of November 2023) Crucial T500. What makes it an unlikely leader is that the E25 controller only has four NAND channels, compared to the eight more commonly found in high-end SSDs. M.2 SSDs (and other M.2 cards) come in different sizes and some motherboards – particularly in laptops – will only hold a drive up to a certain size. They also have different sets of notches (keying) that will prevent you from installing it the wrong way. M.2 Keying and Size Kingston’s Fury Renegade is an improved version of the KC3000 but uses the same Phison E18 controller and 176-layer Micron TLC NAND that originally propelled Seagate’s FireCuda 530 to the top of the charts. It is slightly faster than the KC3000 model and also outpaces its Seagate counterpart in several benchmarks. This makes the Fury Renegade a strong competitor of the 990 PRO and an attractive choice for any PCIe Gen4-compatible build. But also keep in mind that the difference from the KC3000 is marginal. In any SSD context, you will inevitably run into the MLC, TLC, and QLC abbreviations. What these signify is the number of bits that can be written to each cell in NAND (Not-AND) memory chips. In the early days, just one bit could be written to each cell, hence the name single-level cell, or SLC. Solid state drives using SLC memory were (and now only in very rare cases, are) extremely durable but also prohibitively expensive.

As for the PCIe 3.0 generation, the Samsung 970 EVO Plus is still a leader, but the price difference compared to more future-proof PCIe 4.0 SSDs is now uncomfortably small. Best SSDs Sorted by Real-World (Gaming) Performance Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs such as the Aorus Gen5 10000 and Corsair MP700, all of which also use the Phison E26, can reach sequential read speeds of around 10,000 MB/s, but the Crucial T700 goes all the way up to 12,400 MB/s.If you just want a really fast computer for work (and who doesn’t?), you can probably get by with as little as 128 GB and use mechanical hard drives for general storage. However, when looking at the price/performance ratio (performance is usually improved in larger capacities), 1–2 TB is a reasonable price point with few compromises. MLC Vs. TLC Vs. QLC NAND At the time of writing (October 2023), the Crucial T700 is the leading Gen5 SSD (alongside Teamgroup’s T-Force Cardea Z540). Thanks to the latest Micron NAND, sequential performance reaches 12,400 MB/s. That’s enough to put it ahead of earlier competitors using the same Phison E26 controller. In the standalone benchmark for Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringer, multiple scenes/levels are loaded, and the above are the total loading times for these levels. While the difference between budget and high-end SSDs is noticeable, it is crowded at the top. Any SSD will be much faster than any hard drive in games – even if it’s an external SSD in an enclosure. The 970 PRO comes with Samsung’s proprietary controller and MLC chips, as well as an excellent endurance rating of 1,200 TBW (1TB) or 600 TBW (512GB). When looking at price versus performance, the 970 PRO has always been a somewhat questionable choice, but it might be a sensible investment for the most demanding users. Unfortunately, there are no large capacities available.

It is important to remember that M.2 is just a form factor that says nothing of the drive’s performance. Some M.2 SSDs use the 20-year-old SATA interface and have the same limitations as 2.5″ drives. If you have a somewhat modern motherboard, however, it most likely comes with a PCIe/NVMe-capable M.2 slot, so this is the type of SSD to look for. Several versions of the PCIe interface are currently in use. Interface For the aforementioned drives to work with your computer, you will need an M.2 slot and support for PCIe/NVMe. But there may be exceptions: Even without an M.2 slot on your (desktop) motherboard, you can still use one in a full-size PCIe x4 slot using an adapter. But if you want to run your OS from the drive, your motherboard must still support booting from PCIe, which is no guarantee with older motherboards. UL’s 3DMark Storage benchmark is a mix of gaming workloads including level loading, saving, moving/installing, and recording games. It combines these into a total, resulting in a score and an average bandwidth. The Samsung 990 PRO has so far only been beaten by Gen5 SSDs in this benchmark. Right off the bat, the Seagate FireCuda 520 shows that it's not only here to take wins off the PCIe 3.0 set of drives here, but also has the rest of the PCIe 4.0 crowd in its sights, scoring a visible win over the Corsair MP600 in this first test. Booting Windows 10Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another… Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch. Mind you, these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more; in other words, more than just the program. Still, this is interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps.

As for Intel? Even on its latest desktops, it's not even on the PCIe 4.0 map. The new-for-2020 Intel-based Z490 boardsthat rolled out with the company's 10th Generation "Comet Lake-S" desktop processors don't have support for PCIe 4.0, though the rumor mill has suggested that support for PCIe 4.0 will be coming to this platform in the future. (Some Z490 board makers have advertised Z490 motherboards as PCIe 4.0 "ready," while Intel has no comment on the matter.) But as of today, none of the company's in-market mainstream chips, 10th Generation or below, is capable of supporting the PCIe 4.0 spec. This means if you plan on buying this drive and running a lot of sustained reads or writes on it (generally the only time a drive like this needs to be cooled down), then you should consider what passive or active cooling options your motherboard has available for the M.2 slot you plan to use.Some boards have nothing, but many higher-end models (the primary kind you'll be able to put a PCIe 4.0 drive on, incidentally) have hefty metal M.2 heatspreaders as part of the board design. Consumer SSDs became common once density increased to two bits per cell, also known as multi-level cell or MLC. Most high-end drives today use the even denser triple-level cell, or TLC, memory type, whereas some budget SSDs use quad-level cell or QLC NAND. A bit of an anomalous result here. Despite running the test twice, the best score I was able to achieve on the ISO Copy portion of the test was well below that of the competition. (The numbers from the File Copy trace were right-on.) Let's see if that carries over into our sequential read and write tests in Crystal DiskMark 6.0. Crystal DiskMark 6.0

Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus is a lot more affordable than the PRO but very close in terms of actual performance. Although it doesn’t use high-end MLC NAND, this drive is still among the best in the PCIe Gen 3 category. Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSD makers implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.