Seagate FireCuda 540 2 TB Review

Introduction

Seagate is one of the world’s largest and most established manufacturers of hard drives and storage solutions. Throughout decades of innovation, they have been at the forefront of data storage technology, pioneering advancements in HDDs, SSDs, and enterprise storage systems. Their renowned products include the BarraCuda and FireCuda series for consumers, as well as the IronWolf and Exos lines tailored for NAS and data centers.

The Seagate FireCuda 540, released in 2023, has been on the market for some time. It features the Phison E26 controller, which is the company’s flagship PCI-Express 5.0 controller. With the E26, Phison brought high-end transfer rates to consumer storage. However, since its release in 2022, competition has intensified. Although InnoGrit has introduced controllers with limited success, the recently released Silicon Motion SM2508 presents a strong challenge to the E26, especially in terms of energy efficiency.

Seagate has combined their FireCuda 540 SSD with Micron’s 232-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, which runs at 1600 MT/s. They have also added a dedicated DRAM cache for the SSD’s mapping tables.

The FireCuda 540 is available in capacities of 1 TB ($150) and 2 TB ($230). The endurance is set to 1000 TBW and 2000 TBW respectively. Seagate includes a five-year warranty with the FireCuda 540 SSD.