Seagate quote 4K random read/write performance of the 1TB drive as up to 760,000 IOPS for both. Our tested drive produced a write figure of 3,890MB/s, a little short of the official maximum of 4,400MB/s. Using the ATTO benchmark we got a little more performance out of the drive when it came to reads, but a little less when it came to writes. The official Sequential speed ratings for the 1TB drive are up to 5,000MB/s for reads and up to 4,400MB/s for writes. Interestingly it doesn't have the large passive heatsink that Gen4 drives generally come with, so you don't have the potential risk of causing damage when taking the cooler off to use the drive in a motherboard with M.2 cooling.

The FireCuda 520 range consists of just three capacities, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. The FireCuda 520 uses the current standard NAND and controller combination for a PCIe Gen 4 drive Phison PS5016-E16 8-channel controller (in this case, branded as Seagate) and Kioxia BiCS4 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND. With this drive, Seagate has joined a rather exclusive club (at the time of writing at least) of SSD manufacturers that have a PCIe Gen4 drive aimed at the consumer segment of the market. It took quite some time to see the first Seagate NVMe SSD for the consumer space in the shape of the FireCuda 510 which we reviewed late last year, but in no time at all, we've got another 500 series FireCuda, the FireCuda 520.

Seagate seatools graphical