Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB PCIe Gen5 x4 VNMe SSD Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Seagate FireCuda 540 NVMe M.2 SSD is currently on Amazon for just £289.99 or you can buy it from Scan, and while that’s a lot of money, keep in mind this is both a high-capacity drive and a very fast one. Unsurprisingly, it’s cheaper than the flagship drives that can push 14,000 MB/s read speeds, and it costs more than the Gen4 drives that top out at around 7000 MB/s read speeds, so at 10,000 MB/s and just under £300, it’s relatively well priced.

Overview

Seagate has an exceptional reputation for high-performance storage, and it’s easy to see why content creators and gamers have been snapping up their drives for years now. I myself rock a couple of their Gen4 and Gen5 drives in the office, and I’ve never had a single issue with one, and obviously, I hope I never do.

They’ve got a great warranty service that covers this drive for five years, and it comes with free data recovery services for the first three years should something go terribly wrong. However, with 2000 TB TBW, this drive is built to take some serious punishment, so that should give you plenty of confidence in its abilities.

When it comes to read and write performance, the Seagate FireCude 540 doesn’t disappoint, and while not quite the fastest drive we’ve tested, it’s plenty fast, offering speeds of over 10,000 MB/s that is going to make for extremely fast game loading times, even on storage hogs like Call of Duty.

For content creators, rendering video and moving around massive high-resolution video files and assets is going to be easy too. Nobody likes waiting for file transfers, and if you’re coming from a Gen4 drive to a Gen5, they’ll be cut by around 50% and exponentially more if you’re coming from a Gen3 drive or a SATA SSD configuration.

Should I Buy One?

The Seagate FireCude 540 hits a nice sweet spot for the enthusiast market, delivering extremely fast speeds that are more than fast enough for the majority of high-end users without pushing the price too high. If you really need a faster drive than this, you’ll need to spend a fair bit more money, but it’s still more than fast enough to offer a noticeable upgrade from Gen4.