Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB PCIe Gen5 x4 VNMe SSD Review

This drive promised read and write speeds of up to 10,000 MB/s and well, it did pretty much exactly 10,000 in both, which is always good to see, especially so since it slightly exceeded it, so we’re off to a great start.

Again, I was expecting to see up to 250,000 IOPS and again it’s pretty much right on the money here.

We see similarly high speeds in Anvil, and high IOPS too, with good overall response times, but that’s to be expected from a good quality Gen5 drive anyway, and it certainly delivers in that regard.

The drive gets up to speed pretty quickly too, obviously, smaller files are transferred before the drive is up to speed, but on larger files we see it hitting over 9 GB/s from around 4MB and upwards.

AS SSD showed over 9000+ MB/s write and 7300+ MB/s, but this test always scores lower than Crystal Disk Mark, so again, that’s in line with my expectations.

The overall IOPS and score are strong too, not the fastest for a Gen5 drive, but we knew that would be the case as this is more built for durability and long-term abuse than short-term speed.

Access times and loading times are extremely fast though, but again, not surprisingly at 10GB/s!

AJA gave the drive a clean bill of health for high-resolution video recording, with write speeds having no issues with a 5K RED format video encode.

For compression, we see pretty consistent read speeds, with just two small dips in the write speeds, but again, that’s to be expected as the CPU compresses a file there will be a few bumps, but the drive is very quickly back up to full speed with no issues.

Finally, we see an “extremely high” overall score in Final Fantasy, with constantly fast loading times in all scenes.

The drive did get a little warm at 80c, but given Gen5 drives can quickly exceed 100c if not properly cooled, I’d say this is a decent enough score, and we saw no degradation of performance after relentlessly benchmarking the drive.