Seagate Firecuda 530 1TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD

Hard Drive

Seagate Firecuda 530 1TB Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD Main Picture


Background on Solid State Drives

Solid-state drives (SSDs) store data electrically, rather than on magnetic disks like traditional hard drives (HDDs). This means there is virtually no delay when seeking a specific bit of data, and there is no physical limitation to how fast reading and writing of data can happen. Instead, the limits come down to the controller inside the drive, the speed at which the individual flash memory chips can transfer information, and the connection between the drive and the rest of the computer.

These drives are available in many physical forms: 2.5-inch (similar in size to laptop HDDs), PCI-Express (which slot into a system like a graphics card), and M.2 "sticks". The more traditionally shaped drives usually connect to motherboards via SATA, just like hard drives do, and that connection itself tends to be the limiting factor in their performance. M.2 drives can use either SATA or the much faster PCI-Express connection, depending on the drive itself and the motherboard it is installed in. There are also U.2 drives, which are close in size to the 2.5-inch models but use a much faster data connection; they are found more often in servers and datacenters than in desktop workstations.


Seagate's Firecuda 530 Gen4 line of solid-state drives are blazing-fast storage devices. They are built for PCI-Express 4, which offers up to twice the bandwidth that PCI-E 3 provided, enabling much faster read and write performance. If you are looking for a good combination of speed and capacity, this 1TB model is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 7.3GB/s with write speeds up to 6.0GB/s. Real-world speeds will be lower, though, and depend heavily on the application in use.

Model: Seagate ZP1000GM30013

Specifications

Capacity 1,000 GB
Interface PCIe 4.0 x4
Form Factor M.2 2280
Endurance (TBW) 1,275 TBW
Peak Power Draw 6.5 Watts
Chip Layout Single Sided
Net Weight 0.008 kg (0.0 lbs)
Performance
Sequential Read (Peak) 7300 MB/s
Sequential Write (Peak) 6,000 MB/s
Random 4KB Read 800,000 IOPS
Random 4KB Write 1,000,000 IOPS

Throughput is limited to 3000-3300 MB/s when used in a Gen3 M.2 slot