Rating: 84.8
Author: Ruby

Table of Contents

Stylish And Fast

Overall

84.8%

Design - 80%

80%
Speed - 90%

90%
Connectivity - 90%

90%
Price - 79%

79%

Summary

In anticipation of the appearance of the new consoles PlayStation5 and Xbox Series X (recall, they should go on sale in November), external ultra-fast drives will become even more in demand. Today, PC gamers are more interested in traditional SSD options that integrate directly into the motherboard connector. Seagate FireCuda Gaming is no question: it’s a great device in a stylish package, with customizable lighting and speed potential you could only dream of before. The only thing that can confuse is the price, of course. But for now, this SSD is exclusive. After the emergence of competitors (and they will certainly appear), the cost is likely to drop slightly, although it will remain high due to such devices’ increased production cost.

A couple of terabytes solid-state drive with read speed up to 2000 MB / s in a separate case – is this not a dream? We study it in detail.

SSDs continue their systematic attack on HDDs: they are still an expensive pleasure, but the volumes and number of models are growing, and in terms of compactness and speed, hard drives have not been compared for a long time. This year, Seagate introduced the FireCuda Gaming external drive based on the Seagate FireCuda NVMe 510 using NAND flash memory. Now you can buy it – in the presence of versions from 500 GB to 2 TB. We received a 1 TB version for testing. At the time of writing this review, it costs about 259.99 dollars.

You can also read: Seagate One Touch SSD 1TB Test and Review: A Tiny Drive-in A Canvas Suit

Design

The drive is a traditional “brick” as thick as an average smartphone. The surface has a matte finish. On the bottom, there is an anti-slip rubber insert. There is a slot on the right side of the drive throughout the metal case – this makes the SSD look like a large USB flash drive with an opening cap. Of course, nothing opens up here – it’s just a decorative element, inside which there is an LED backlight. The only connector is USB-C, next to which is a miniature drive status indicator. More details about the interface are below.

Software and lighting

By default, the bar is highlighted in white, but you can download the Seagate Toolkit app and set up alternate colors if you want. Interestingly, the settings are saved on the disk itself and do not change when connected to another computer. Several patterns are also provided for backlighting: for example, not a solid, constant light, but a ripple, blinking, or flashing with different colors of the spectrum.

Proprietary software allows you to configure BackUp, although it should be humiliating for a super-fast SSD to work as a backup storage. In the backup, as usual, you can set up a schedule, select folders for synchronization.

You can also read: Silicon Power SSD Slim S55 Review: Fast and reliable

Like any new device, FireCuda Gaming requires modern interfaces. The drive comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable, so connecting it to Type-A can be a problem (except through an adapter). Also, this SSD reveals its full potential (and this is read speed up to 2000 MB / s) only with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 × 2 interface. Our test computer’s motherboard was only able to offer USB 3.1, so the benchmarks weren’t the best. Nevertheless, the speed of 1 Gb / s demonstrated in the benchmark is also a very decent result.