Seagate recently released a new FireCuda drive under the SATA SSD form factor – the Seagate FireCuda 120. Now that this news came out, I realized that Seagate has a FireCuda for SSHD, M.2 PCIe 3.0 and Gen4. But they don’t have a FireCuda in SATA SSD form factor yet, until now. The FireCuda 120 is a “gaming SSD” and is primarily geared towards, well, gamers. It offers sequential read speed of up to 560MB/s and up to 540MB/s of sequential write speed. Check out more details below.
Seagate FireCuda 120 – A Gaming SSD
A SATA SSD may not be as exciting news compared to a fast M.2 NVMe Gen3 or Gen4 SSD. But SATA SSDs are still faster compared to a hard disk drive (HDD) and they are cheaper compared to NVMe SSDs. Aside from the up to 560MB/s and 540MB/s sequential read and write speeds, the FireCuda 120 also features a high endurance rating of 0.7 DWPD or Drive Writes Per Day.
Drive Write Per Day is quite different from TBW or Total Bytes Written, but they basically have something to do with the drive’s life span. DWPD shows how many times a user can expect to overwrite the entire capacity of the SSD per day before it becomes unreliable. Having a DWPD of 1 means a 1TB SSD can withstand 1TB of data written to it every day for the warranty period.
The Seagate FireCuda 120 has a 0.7 DWPD meaning 70% of the capacity can be written on it per day. In comparison, Seagate’s IronWolf 510 has a DWPD rating of 1. When it comes to TBW or Total Bytes Written, the FireCuda 120 has up to 5,600TB of TBW rating. It also has a 1.8M hours of mean time between failures or MTBF.
I don’t really see anything special with the new FireCuda 120 aside from its high endurance rating. The SSD has an all-black design with a “FireCuda Gaming” logo on it. There are no RGB lighting or any gamer-vibe to it. But the Seagate FireCuda 120 is the only SSD series from the company that has an available capacity of up to 4TB. The Seagate BarraCuda 120 SATA SSD has only up to 2TB of capacity, and the FireCuda 510 and FireCuda 520 are only available up to 2TB capacity as well.
Price and Availability
The Seagate FireCuda 120 Gaming SSD series is now available. It comes with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $104.99 for the 500GB, $199.49 for the 1TB capacity, $388.49 for the 2TB capacity and $650.99 for the 4TB capacity. Seagate is also offering a 5-year warranty for the said drive.
Yes, they are currently more expensive than the competition. For comparison, a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO currently retails for around $150, with an initial MSRP of $199.99. A Crucial MX500 1TB currently retails for around $115, and Seagate’s own Barracuda 120 1TB sells for around $115 as well. If you want this drive due to its high endurance rating, I suggest that you wait a little bit until retail prices go down.
By the way, the Samsung 860 EVO 4TB had an MSRP of $699.99 USD, but now it is currently selling for around $650 USD. That’s basically similar to the FireCuda 120 4TB’s MSRP. So, I expect that retail prices may go down at some point in the near future.
