Seagate‘s first ever PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, the FireCuda 540, has been taken down from Amazon UK and B&H Photo, having been available for pre-order earlier in the day. It looks like someone’s got a little trigger-happy in listing it online, as the SSD was only available for a few hours before the plug got pulled. Although it’s since been deleted, the fact it was listed for pre-order suggests the Seagate product isn’t far away.
In fact, the Firecuda 540, coming in 4TB, 2TB, and 1TB versions, will likely be one of the first commercially available PCIe 5.0 SSDs. PCIe (or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) lets you connect GPUs and SSDs to your motherboard with a high-bandwidth expansion bus. These upcoming PCIe 5.0 drives will double the current PCIe 4.0’s data transfer rate to 32GT/s, and are therefore hotly anticipated by PC gamers looking to upgrade their machines with the best hardware.
In terms of pure performance, the Firecuda 540 won’t quite compete with the top end PCIe 5.0 drives. While fast, its listed sequential read and write speeds of up to 10 GB/s for the 2TB SKU, and 9.5 GB/s for read and 8.5 GB/s for write for the 1TB SKU, don’t hit the heights that PCIe 5.0 architecture can afford. But compare that to the WD Black SN850X, one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives available. Its read speed of 3.5GB/s and write speed of 3.0GB/s pale in comparison to the Firecuda 540.
The pricing information available shows the 1TB SKU listed at $189.99 on B&H Photo and £203.48 on Amazon UK. The pricing for the 2TB and 4TB SKUs are unknown. We also don’t know what the launch date of the Seagate Firecuda 540 is just yet, but we expect it to be sometime soon. Until then, pick from the top PCIe 4.0 drives on the market with our guide to the best gaming SSD.