Seagate FireCuda 120 SATA SSD - Endurance champion for 2020?
129If you have been watching the SSD market then you will already know that Seagate finally stepped in with some pretty impressive products lately. Notably the Firecuda range of NVme SSDs for both Gen 3 and Gen 4 enabled PC's. If you dont know about them then you should check out our videos for them (links below)
Today though we are taking a look at the newly released Firecuda 120 SATA SSD. Ok its not going to beat out the NVMe drives in outright speed, But SATA SSDs are often more than fast enough for all of the main things you might do like gaming, content creation and general fast storage workloads. They do still offer speeds in excess of 500 megabytes per second. And the big benefit of SATA SSD's are that they tend to be significantly cheaper than NVMe and are much less limited in terms of connectivity, with many motherboards having several SATA ports vs only the odd NVMe slot.
So whats special about this one then? Well, having a look at the spec sheet we can see that everything looks fairly normal for a main brand SSD, Speeds are all very similar as they are more dictated by the limitation of the SATA bus than the SSD, IOPS are pretty high across the board with the Firecuda taking a top spot with 100, 000 which is as high as you get with these types of drives, all which we were expecting, the Firecuda is supposed to be a step up from the Barracuda which competes admirably in the mid range. Plus as a bonus both of the seagate SSD's come with a 5 year warranty with is never a bad thing. But then we get to this - terrabytes written. This is a measure of how much data you can expect to be written during the life of the drive. looking at the 1TB drive, At 600TBW the Barracuda 120 is looking pretty strong against the mainstream competition and is probably more than most would ever use, but the new Firecuda offers over double that with 1400TBW. Thats more than ANY other big brand SSD offers, EVEN in their PRO level SSD's which can cost significantly more., this is great news for enthusiast gamers or even more importantly content creators who are making and storing large amounts files and are wanting to be sure their investment pays off long before their SSD wears out and needs replacing.
So, is the Firecuda 120 SSD the one to get? Well at approximately £140 for a 1TB model its about £25 more than the barracua 120, so if you are a gamer and happy to pay the premium to get the extra endurance then absolutely yes. Thats not to say that the Barracuda isnt a good option, if you are putting together a PC and budgets are tight, you might be better off making the saving to upgrade something else. However if you work with large volumes of data all the time, then this is where the Firecuda really shines being significantly cheaper than anything else in the pro level market right now, and as much as half the price of an NVMe equivalent.
Seagate Firecuda NVMe videos:
PCIe Gen 4 FireCuda 520:
https://youtu.be/pd5TIfcbXMQ
PCIe Gen 3 FireCuda 510:
https://youtu.be/_-5q1j-LZuI
Want to know more about SSD's before you buy? Check out our BUYERS GUIDE:
https://youtu.be/mOjyg8oa6Ko
Check out the Seagate range on our website:
https://www.scan.co.uk/shops/seagate/brand-latest
See the latest pricing on the Seagate Firecuda 120 and Barracuda 120 SATA SSDs:
https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/solid-state-drives/2627/2375/2628#filter=1&manufacturers=Seagate
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