Are those Seagate FireCuda 530 SSDs really that good?

When you really hammer an SSD with writes it slows down dramatically. It cannot sustain maximum speed for more than say 40GB of transfers. For booting the OS and running some programs that makes no difference at all but if you’re moving a VM or cloning a drive it’s shockingly slow.

Same problem if you’re working with huge video files and you need to move or duplicate them.

When it comes to lots of tiny reads and writes SSDs are a lot better than HDD but not nearly as fast as when moving large blocks of data.

When you’re buying a very expensive SSD these are the hidden performance features you’re paying for.

An example of this would be Optane. It’s not actually that fast and the M.2 version does not even use all available lanes in the socket. However it’s fast where it counts, reading and writing tiny blocks of data with no loss of performance. The end result is in actual applications where you’re doing real work it’s fantastically fast.

As for whether FireCuda is suitable I don’t know. All I know is that SSDs are not as fast as they seem from first impressions. Optane is the only one with consistent performance and never slows down for any reason, the rest all have some sort of compromise.

2 Likes