The gaming market has experienced significant growth over the last decade. In addition to boosting PC sales, the peripherals market associated with the segment has also expanded. Installed sizes for games now regularly run into hundreds of gigabytes, thanks in large part to support for increased resolutions and more detailed graphics. The data also needs to be loaded into memory as fast as possible in order to improve the gaming experience.

Unsurprisingly then, gamers want the fastest possible portable SSDs to store their games. The 20 Gbps transfer rates promised by USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 has an instant appeal in this market segment. Keeping this in mind, many vendors have introduced USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 bus-powered portable SSDs targeting the gaming crowd. Last year, we looked at Western Digital's WD_BLACK P50. Seagate's FireCuda Gaming SSD was available in the market around the same time, but it didn't make it to our testbed in time for that review.

We recently got the Seagate offering into our latest testbed, and took the opportunity to refresh the numbers for the WD_BLACK P50 with our latest test suite as well. The review below looks at the performance and value proposition of the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD.

Introduction and Product Impressions

External bus-powered storage devices capable of 2GBps+ performance have become quite common in the market today. Rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x) have been key enablers. While USB4 (USB's most recent avatar) mandates a minimum of 10Gbps data transfer rate only, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) has emerged as a parallel standard. It has been slow to gain traction, partly due to the lack of widespread host support in desktops and other computing platforms. While that has been changing slowly, portable SSD vendors have been hard at work creating products in this category. Professional content creators and gamers are key consumers willing to pay a premium for these high-performance devices.

On the silicon front, ASMedia happens to be the main (if not, the only) solutions supplier on the device side. Similar to the WD_BLACK P50 reviewed last year, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD is also based on the ASMedia ASM2364 bridge chip, and has a premium metal construction. The FireCuda Gaming SSD's unique selling point is the available of RGB lighting that can be controlled using Seagate's Toolkit. One can dismiss RGB as a fad, but the fact is that RGB sells in the gaming market.

The FireCuda Gaming SSD is more compact (104.4 mm x 52.5 mm x 10 mm) compared to the WD_BLACK P50, while also weighing 15g lesser (100g). Only one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C cable in supplied with the SSD, but it is longer (50cm) than the one supplied with the WD_BLACK P50. Both SSDs sport a high-performance M.2 2280 NVMe SSD inside, and have a premium metal construction.

A quick overview of the internal capabilities of the storage devices is given by CrystalDiskInfo. This also serves to verify S.M.A.R.T access from the host port. Note that we are including results from our DIY 20Gbps external SSD - the Silverstone MS12 equipped with a SK hynix Gold P31 1TB NVMe SSD.

Testbed Setup and Evaluation Methodology

Direct-attached storage devices such as the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD are evaluated using the Quartz Canyon NUC (essentially, the Xeon / ECC version of the Ghost Canyon NUC) configured with 2x 16GB DDR4-2667 ECC SODIMMs and a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD - the IM2P33E8 1TB from ADATA.

The most attractive aspect of the Quartz Canyon NUC is the presence of two PCIe slots (electrically, x16 and x4) for add-in cards. In the absence of a discrete GPU - for which there is no need in a DAS testbed - both slots are available. In fact, we also added a spare SanDisk Extreme PRO M.2 NVMe SSD to the CPU direct-attached M.2 22110 slot in the baseboard in order to avoid DMI bottlenecks when evaluating Thunderbolt 3 devices. This still allows for two add-in cards operating at x8 (x16 electrical) and x4 (x4 electrical). Since the Quartz Canyon NUC doesn't have a native USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port, Silverstone's SST-ECU06 add-in card was installed in the x4 slot. All non-Thunderbolt devices are tested using the Type-C port enabled by the SST-ECU06.

The specifications of the testbed are summarized in the table below:

The testbed hardware is only one segment of the evaluation. Over the last few years, the typical direct-attached storage workloads have also evolved. High bit-rate 4K videos at 60fps have become quite common, and 8K videos are starting to make an appearance. Game install sizes have also grown steadily, thanks to high resolution textures and artwork. Backups tend to involve larger number of files, many of which are small in size. Keeping these in mind, our evaluation scheme for DAS units involves multiple workloads which are described in detail in the corresponding sections.

• Synthetic workloads using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO
• Real-world access traces using PCMark 10's storage benchmark
• Custom robocopy workloads reflective of typical DAS usage
• Sequential write stress test

In the next section, we have an overview of the performance of the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD in these benchmarks. Prior to providing concluding remarks, we have some observations on the drive's power consumption numbers and thermal solution also.

Performance Benchmarks

Benchmarks such as ATTO and CrystalDiskMark help provide a quick look at the performance of the direct-attached storage device. The results translate to the instantaneous performance numbers that consumers can expect for specific workloads, but do not account for changes in behavior when the unit is subject to long-term conditioning and/or thermal throttling. Yet another use of these synthetic benchmarks is the ability to gather information regarding support for specific storage device features that affect performance.

Synthetic Benchmark - ATTO

Seagate claims read and write speeds of up to 2000 MBps, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. ATTO benchmarking is restricted to a single configuration in terms of queue depth, and is only representative of a small sub-set of real-world workloads. It does allow the visualization of change in transfer rates as the I/O size changes, with optimal performance being reached around 512 KB for a queue depth of 4.

Full System Drive Benchmark Bandwidth (MBps)Full System Drive Benchmark Latency (us)Full System Drive Benchmark ScoreExpand All

Overall, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD emerges with the leading score in the PCMark 10 Storage Bench, though it is followed quite closely by the SK hynix P31 in the Silverstone MS12 enclosure.

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

The performance of the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD in various real-world access traces as well as synthetic workloads was brought out in the preceding sections. We also looked at the performance consistency for these cases. Power users may also be interested in performance consistency under worst-case conditions, as well as drive power consumption. The latter is also important when used with battery powered devices such as notebooks and smartphones. Pricing is also an important aspect. We analyze each of these in detail below.

Worst-Case Performance Consistency

Flash-based storage devices tend to slow down in unpredictable ways when subject to a large number of small-sized random writes. Many benchmarks use that scheme to pre-condition devices prior to the actual testing in order to get a worst-case representative number. Fortunately, such workloads are uncommon for direct-attached storage devices, where workloads are largely sequential in nature. Use of SLC caching as well as firmware caps to prevent overheating may cause drop in write speeds when a flash-based DAS device is subject to sustained sequential writes.

Our Sequential Writes Performance Consistency Test configures the device as a raw physical disk (after deleting configured volumes). A fio workload is set up to write sequential data to the raw drive with a block size of 128K and iodepth of 32 to cover 90% of the drive capacity. The internal temperature is recorded at either end of the workload, while the instantaneous write data rate and cumulative total write data amount are recorded at 1-second intervals.

CrystalDiskMark Workloads - Power Consumption
TOP: Seagate FireCuda 1TBWD_BLACK P50 1TBSilverstone MS12	BOTTOM: WD_BLACK P50 1TBWD_BLACK P50 1TBSilverstone MS12Silverstone MS12Seagate FireCuda 1TB

Despite the presence of RGB lighting, the FireCuda Gaming SSD does not have any power consumption penalty. In fact, the peak power consumption of the P50 is higher at 8.42W compared to 8.30W for the FireCuda. The Seagate SSD also goes down to a low power state faster than the P50.

Final Words

The Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD is currently on Amazon for $210. Interestingly, the WD_BLACK P50 1TB is also priced the same. The FireCuda Gaming SSD holds the edge in most cases with its generous 200GB of SLC cache. This ensures that only heavy power users transferring more than 200GB of data in one go ever get to dip down to the 900 MBps TLC-direct write speeds. The WD_BLACK P50, on the other hand, holds steady at around 1400 MBps all through after the 12GB SLC cache runs out. The P50 delivers better long-term consistency, but the FireCuda Gaming SSD wins out on the important game loading trace replay benchmarks in the PCMark 10 Storage Bench. Seagate's configurable RGB feature makes the portable SSD blend well with other gaming peripherals - and this essentially comes at no extra cost. The 0.5m Type-C cable of the FireCuda Gaming SSD is also useful for gaming desktops where the Gen 2x2 port might be tucked away in the rear I/O. So, our recommendation is for the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD unless there is a demonstrable need to write more than 20% of the drive's capacity at full speed in one pass.

Users solely focused on performance (with no interest in RGB functionality or industrial design matching their existing gaming gear) can save quite a bit by going the DIY route - the Silverstone MS12 ($70) + SK hynix Gold P31 ($135 - $20) combination works out to $185. Despite costing $25 less, it performs just as well for regular gaming usage as the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD and the WD_BLACK P50.