Seagate‘s first ever PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, the FireCuda 540, has now been officially released. The new gen drive was listed yesterday but swiftly taken down in a premature launch mishap, leading us to speculate the drive would be with us soon. Well, so it has proven. Seagate heralds a new, superfast generation of SSDs, PCIe 5.0, with the Firecuda 540.
The Seagate Firecuda 540 will be available in 2TB and 1TB versions at launch, although a 4TB version was also rumored. It’s not going to be the absolute fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD on the market – well, after others have been released, that is. It boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 10 GB/s, which sounds impressive, and – to be fair – it is a big step up from the previous generation.
But PCIe 5.0 architecture can go a lot higher. At Computex, the Patriot Viper PV553 was claimed to reach up to 12,400 MB/s sequential read and 11,800 MB/s sequential write speeds. When you put that side-by-side with one of the fastest SSDs on the market right now, the WD Black SN850X, there’s no contest. Its sequential read and write speeds of 7,300MB/s and 6,600MB/s, respectively, were once pretty jaw-dropping, but they seem positively sluggish now that we’ve seen what PCIe 5.0 drives can offer.
On Amazon, the 1TB SKU is listed at $179.99 and the 2TB SKU at $299.99, but both are out of stock on the US platform at time of writing. Well, if you can’t wait for the restock, consider your options with our best gaming SSD list.