Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1Tb PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe

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Here the drives are put through a very important test for creative types. As anyone who regularly works in programs like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop can tell you, a constant pinch point is the time it takes for these programs to launch. Mind you, these two tests don't tell the whole story of how a drive will perform for all creative applications. Depending on the complexity of your work and the number of elements in a scene, your software may have to load 3D models, sound files, physics elements, and more; in other words, more than just the program. Still, this is interesting fodder for folks who live and breathe these Adobe apps.

Another detail worth noting is that, much like the FireCuda 530, you have to opt for the 2TB or 4TB models to get the best possible performance.The drive carries a much higher durability rating than most PCIe 3.0 drives, as well, at 1,800 terabytes written (TBW) for the 1TB version we tested. Seagate guarantees all drives in the FireCuda line with a five-year warranty. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we test. Those numbers may or may not be a minimum requirement, but also add – at the very least – the amount of RAM in your system to be on the safe side (to make room for the swap file). Office apps are usually not that demanding either, with MS Office taking up about 4 GB of space on your SSD. Games tend to use a lot more but can range in size from a few hundred megabytes to well over 100 gigabytes, i.e. a lot more demanding in terms of storage space. Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus is a lot more affordable than the PRO but very close in terms of actual performance. Although it doesn’t use high-end MLC NAND, this drive is still among the best in the PCIe Gen 3 category.

These copy tests are also derived from PCMark 10 traces. While at first these numbers might look low compared to the straight sequential-throughput numbers achieved in benchmarks like Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and AS-SSD, that's due to the way this score is calculated and the nature of and differences between the source data. If you're regularly moving files around on your drive from one folder to another, this test is a handy relative throughput measure. Other PCIe 5.0 SSDs such as the Aorus Gen5 10000 and Corsair MP700, all of which also use the Phison E26, can reach sequential read speeds of around 10,000 MB/s, but the Crucial T700 goes all the way up to 12,400 MB/s. M.2 SSDs (and other M.2 cards) come in different sizes and some motherboards – particularly in laptops – will only hold a drive up to a certain size. They also have different sets of notches (keying) that will prevent you from installing it the wrong way. M.2 Keying and Size

Seagate's latest drive is fast, but expensive.

Moving on from PCMark 10-derived numbers, the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 sequential tests, meanwhile, simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. This benchmark consists of a range of gaming-related workloads that often apply to other usage scenarios as well. Its scores are based on the average bandwidth from a range of tasks that include loading, installing, saving, moving, and recording a number of specific games. In other words, it’s not a universal proxy for overall performance but one of the better ones for consumer workloads. 1. Fastest NVMe M.2 SSD: Crucial T700 (and T-Force Z540) Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the SSD benchmarking utility AS-SSD. This trio of tests involves copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another… What it shares with its competitors from the first batch of Gen5 SSDs, however, is that it requires efficient cooling to avoid overheating and throttling. If you don’t have a decent heat spreader on your motherboard, it is probably a good idea to opt for the T700 version with an included heatsink. So, while the fastest M.2 SSDs now use the PCIe 5.0 standard, Gen4 SSDs are far more common. Gen4-capable systems start with Intel’s 11th/12th-gen Core platforms or AMD counterparts based on an X570 , B550 , or TRX40 motherboard or later.