After entering the PCIe Gen 4 generation, the sequential read and write performance of more than 5000 MB/s has become the low standard of a new generation of high-performance SSDs. The performance of the flagship product is even 7000 MB/s, but this performance is PCIe Gen4 SSD. the ceiling? Seagate launched its flagship product using Micron's new B47R flash memory chips in the second half of this year: FireCuda 530 SSD. How does it actually perform? Let's take a look at Chen Ba's unboxing test.

●Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD box and appearance

Let's take a look at the boxing and appearance of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD. The test product sent by Seagate has a very special outer box marked with the words "The Secret to Next-Gen Game", representing this time. Gamer orientation for the Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD.

Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD shipping box appearance.

The top cover of the box is also printed with a photo of the heat sink version of this cooperation with EK. Unfortunately, I don't know if it will be introduced in China. Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD genuine product box in shipping box.

The front of the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD box is a bit different from the previous Seagate FireCuda 520's "mascot" attitude. Chen Ba borrowed the 4TB version this time. The upper right corner of the box is marked with a sequential read and write performance of 7000 MB/s, and the bottom is marked with a PCIe Gen 4x4 interface.

The hardware specifications marked on the box, the particle part adopts 3D TLC, and provides a 5-year limited warranty and a 3-year data rescue service.

The product description marked on the back is roughly the same as the specifications marked on the side of the box.

The contents of the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD box include a warranty manual, a data rescue card and two stickers in addition to the SSD itself.

The Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD is designed with a two-sided layout, this is the side with the control AD538SD chip.

Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD layout with stickers removed, with four flash memory, one DRAM buffer memory and SSD controller.

The SSD controller is Seagate's own STXZY01049E0, which is the Remark version of Phison PS5018-E18. It provides PCIe 4.0 x4 transmission specifications, up to 7400 -ic/" title="7400 model">7400-ic/" title="7400 Model">7400-ic/" title="7400Model">7400-ic/" title="7400Model">7400-ic/" title="7400Model">7400-ic/" title="7400Model" >7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400 -ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic /" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="Model 7400">7400-ic/" title="7400 model">7400 MB/s sequential read, 7000 MB/s sequential write, 1000K IOPS read and write performance.

The buffer memory is SK hynix H5AN8G6NCJ DDR4, which provides 8Gb (1GB) capacity to correspond to the 2GB flash memory configuration on this side.

The flash memory particle is Micron IA8HG94AYA, which is a 176-layer 3D TLC NAND configuration with a single capacity of 512GB. This B47R flash memory particle launched by Micron adopts ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface) bus technology and can reach a maximum speed of 1600 MT/s on a single channel.

The other side of the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD has four flash memory chips and one cache memory design.

The grain layout on the other side of the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD.

●Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD measured performance

Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD.

Next, let's take a look at the performance test of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD. The test platform uses Intel Z590 chipset motherboard and PCIe Gen 4x4 lanes for testing. The following are the parameters of the test platform:

◆Processor: Intel Core i9-11900K

◆Motherboard: ROG Maximus XIII Extreme

◆Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 8GB x2

◆System SSD: Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB

◆Power supply: ROG THOR 850W

◆Cooling system: CORSAIR iCUE H150i RGB PRO XT 360mm AIO water cooling

◆Operating system: Windows 10 Pro 20H2 version

The Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD has a usable capacity of 3726 GB after WIndows 10 system formatting.

Use Crystal Diskinfo to take a look at the parameters of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD, which adopts PCIe Gen 4.0 specification and transmits through PCIe x4 channel.

◆Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD Crystal DiskMark performance test

Since the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD uses Micron B47R flash memory particles this time, the transmission specification of a single chip is 1600MT/s. Under the 8-channel setting with the PS5018-E18 controller, the theoretical speed can reach 9500MB/s, but it is limited by Limited by the bandwidth limit of PCIe Gen 4x4 (7880 MB/s), Seagate still sets the performance specification of FireCuda 530 at 7000 MB/s sequential read and write performance.

In the CrystalDiskMark test section, the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD has a sequential read score of 6799.37 MB/s and a sequential write score of 6940.42 MB/s. In the part of random write depth 1 in 4K small blocks, the read speed is 60.14 MB /s, the writing speed is 244.62 MB/s.

◆Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD ATTO Disk Benchmark performance test

In the ATTO Disk BenchMark test, the read peak value of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD appears in blocks above 256KB (inclusive), with a read speed of 6.64 GB/s, and the write peak value also appears in 256KB blocks, which is 6.45 GB/s or so.

In addition, in terms of IO access speed, the number of writes per second begins to decrease when the block is above 32KB, and when it is read, it begins to decrease when the block is above 16KB.

◆Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD AS SSD Benchmark performance test

In the AS SSD Benchmark section, the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD scored 10373. Under the 1GB test file setting, the sequential read and write scores were: read 4889.96 MB/s, write 4970.36 MB/s.

The performance of the IO part is in the 4K-64 Thrd part, the Seagate Firecuda 530 4TB SSD has a read performance of 895190 iops, and the write part is 900755 iops.

In addition, in terms of copy performance, Seagate Firecuda 530 4TB SSD provides a speed of 2236.5 MB/s for copying ISO files, 1854.64 MB/s for copying program files, and 2645.91 MB/s for copying games.

◆Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD PCMark 10 storage performance test

Then use PCMark 10 software to simulate the actual computer usage for testing, which is divided into three tests: Full System Drive Benchmark for testing comprehensive performance, Data Drive Benchmark for data storage and Drive Performance Consistency Test for testing durability performance:

First of all, let's look at the Full System Drive Benchmark part of the comprehensive performance test. It mainly uses Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD as the only way to install SSD in the computer for performance testing. It will test the boot time of Windows 10 and the open time of Adobe applications. The opening time of the four games and the performance test of file copying were conducted in 3 rounds of 69 tests, and a total of 204 GB files were written.

The Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD scored 3223 points in this part, with an average single IO access time of 53 microseconds and a bandwidth of 525.07 MB/s during access.

As far as the test results of individual items are concerned, the bandwidth obtained by Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD in the part of Windows 10 booting is about 310 MB/s, but in the part of writing 4 ISO files (20 GB in total) It came to the level of more than 4000 MB/s.

Next is the DATA Drive Benchmark test part used as a data disk, where the Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD obtained a score of 5063, a bandwidth of 758.11 MB/s, and an average access time of 31 microseconds.

In terms of the performance of the detailed test, the performance of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD can be up to 1133 MB/s for internal copying of the disk, and about 777 MB/s for writing and about 513 MB/s for reading in the part of external access. .

The last is Drive Performance Consistency of disk durability, using Adobe series authoring software, large ISO file writing/copying, and 339 JPEG file writing/copying and other items for testing. In different test stages, the SSD will be tested first. Perform different forms of large-scale write operations to test the access performance of the SSD after different large-scale write operations. The Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD scored 2685 in this section, achieved a bandwidth of 632.76 MB/s, and an average single access time of 92 microseconds.

Test results for the Seagate Firecuda 530 4TB SSD.

In the detail part, after the Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD 4TB started to continuously pre-write 50 GB of data, the performance did not decrease significantly in the continuous test phase, until the seventh and eighth random pre-writing tests, the performance There is a significant decline, and the minimum will drop to about 1400MB/s. In the test phase of continuous pre-writing of 50 GB, the access bandwidth of the Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD 4TB dropped to about 2600 MB/s, which lost about 20% of the performance compared to the empty disk test. Finally, in the test project after letting the SSD controller rearrange the internal data arrangement at an interval of 5 minutes, the Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD 4TB quickly recovered to near-empty disk read and write performance.

In addition, Chen Ba also used the linear writing function of AIDA64 to test the performance of the buffer memory of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD. After continuous writing to about 37% (about 1.38GB), the writing speed will drop to about 1450 MB/s.

Test results of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD in AIDA64 sequential linear write.

●Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD test summary

According to the test results, although the actual sequential read and write speed of Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB is slightly lower than the official mark of 7000 MB/s, in terms of overall write performance, it is currently a 7000 MB/s SSD on the market. The best one in the product, Seagate FireCuda 530 SSD is quite impressive in terms of sequential write speed and IO access frequency.

In addition, in terms of the stability of continuous writing, Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB SSD still has stable performance after writing to a certain capacity in the Drive Performance Consistency test in PCMark 10. Only the performance of transferring large files is affected. However, it can also be quickly reconfigured to restore performance through the controller.

To sum up, this time Seagate does provide the top performance SSD option on the market on FireCuda 530, not only using Micron high-speed flash memory particles, but also the controller used in the continuous writing algorithm also provides quite excellent performance. The performance, corresponding to the high-end game performance that the FireCuda 530 mainly focuses on this time, should be well deserved.