Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD Review

Seagate’s FireCuda series of SSDs are built for gaming, speed and endurance. Whether you want to upgrade your existing PC or building a beast for gaming, the FireCuda 120 SSD is built with SATA 6 GB/s interface to enhance your PC performance.

Features

The 2.5-inch FireCuda 120 SSD claimed to deliver sequential speeds up to 560MB/s read and 540MB/s write, while random speeds are slated to deliver 100,000 IOPS read and 90,000 IOPS write. The SSD comes with 1.8M hours MTBF, with 1400 of Total Bytes Written. You also get Seagate’s SeaTools to monitor drive health, performance, and firmware updates.

Additionally, FireCuda offers three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services with 95% success rate against unexpected data loss.

Performance

To test what Seagate claims, we added the SSD on our test bed (Intel Core i7 CPU, 8 GB RAM, Windows 10 OS and Cooler Master 350 Plus).

Running the synthetic benchmarks, to identifying the key strengths and weaknesses of a drive. It performed really well on Crystal Disk Mark (sequential) and resulted in 182.03 MB/s read and 156.87 MB/s write speed.

Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD Review - Crystal Disk Mark

Using the HD Tune Pro, it delivered maximum and minimum read speeds of 162.3 MB/s and 153.5 MB/s respectively.

Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD Review - HD Tune Pro

The AS SSD benchmarking (sequential) was also splendid, 174.93 MB/s read, 146.02 MB/s write.

Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD Review - AS SSD

Using the copy benchmark, it delivered –
ISO 126.71 MB/s speed
Program 102.11 MB/s speed
Game 137.44 MB/s speed

Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD Review - ATTO Benchmark

In our random test in which we transferred the assorted 5GB data (Video, PDF, Word and other files) from our HDD drive to the Seagate SSD, it took only 1 min 02 sec. While transferring the same data from drive to PC drive it took about 1 min 11 sec. On the other hand, when I transferred the 1.2 GB movie to the drive, it took only 10 sec which is similar to the last drive.

To test its real-life performance, I installed Windows 10 on this drive and added all the essential software including Adobe Photoshop, MS-Office, etc. The boot time of the machine was boosted from 20 secs to 09 sec. While working on the PC, we experienced faster processing and app loading as well.

The SSD is built for professional and gaming enthusiasts, so we installed some of the high graphics-intensive games on the machine such as Thief and Need for Speed games. The gaming operation was quite smooth with great rendering and amazing performance. Playing games like ‘The Hobbit’ was an amazing experience on the machine using the drive. It boosted the rendering speed as well as the enhanced overall gaming performance.