Seagate FireCuda 520 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD Linux Performance

For those that have been considering the Seagate FireCuda 520 as a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive, here are some benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux with this ZP500GM3A002 drive.

While we have benchmarked under Linux the Corsair Force MP600 and Sabrent Rocket 4.0, one of the other few name-brand PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs that is currently available for pairing nicely with the likes of the AMD Ryzen 3000 series is the Seagate FireCuda 520. With having an extra Zen 2 test box in the racks, recently I bought the 500GB FireCuda 520 for going along with that AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + ASUS TUF X570-PLUS WiFi setup.

The 500GB model (ZP500GM3A002) is rated for sequential reads up to 5000MB/s, sequential writes up to 2500MB/s, random reads up to 430k IOPS, and random writes up to 630k IOPS. All of the FireCuda 520 drives are backed by a five year warranty. The FireCuda 520 employs a Phison E16 NVMe controller and using Toshiba 96L TLC NAND.

With the FireCuda 520 I benchmarked it against the PCIe 4.0 NVMe Corsair Force MP600 1TB/2TB drives as well as various PCIe 3.0 Samsung SSDs for reference. With this just being a unit purchased retail and not often receiving solid-state drive review samples, this is just a collection of tests for a few drives available at the time and mostly putting out these results for reference purposes.

Testing on the AMD Ryzen box was done with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, EXT4 on all file-systems, and using the Linux 5.8 Git kernel. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various consumer-minded disk/I/O benchmarks were carried out on these tested drives.