The Firecuda line of SSD drives are Seagate’s solutions designed to meet the needs of professional gamers. We take a look at the Firecuda 120 SSD internal drive.
As games have progressed and become more complex over time, hard disk drives (HDD) don’t cut it any longer. A standard 2.5″ internal Solid State Drive (SSD) should be the bare minimum you should have in your gaming rig to reduce load times. The FireCuda 120 SSD has been designed for exactly that – take everything PC games throw at it.
The Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD is available from 500 GB to up to 4 TB capacity, able to max out SATA 6 Gb/s speeds, and durability of up to 5,600 TB TBW (Total Bytes Written).
Out-of-the box, you’ll find that the Firecuda 120 SSD looks much like any other 2.5″ internal SSD, with the exception of the Firecuda Gaming print on it’s enclosure. Installation is no harder, or easier, than any other internal SATA SSD drive.
What does set it apart though is it’s data transfer speeds. The Firecuda 120 SSD is advertised to be able to make full use of the SATA 6 Gb/s (750 MB/s) interface to hit its advertised speeds of 500 MB/s.
We ran the Firecuda 120 SSD across two separate profiles on CrystalDiskMark – Peak and Real World, to simulate instances that will allow the SSD to hit its peak speed as well as data transfer in a more typical “real world” scenario.
While it doesn’t max out the SATA III’s peak data transfer rate of 750 MB/s, the drive didn’t seem to slow down much at all and consistently hit speeds above its advertised 500 MB/s transfer rate.
Why SATA III SSDs when M.2 PCIe or USB 3.2 Gen2 drives are much faster?
With the advancements of technology, data interfaces can now transfer data at speeds much faster than the Firecuda 120 SSD’s 500 MB/s – M.2 NVME drives on PCIe 3.0 can transfer up 3,940 MB/s and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 SSD drives can transfer up to 2,000 MB/s. So why would you get a SATA III internal SSD?
Well, maybe because 500 MB/s is good enough right now. Drive speeds only affect game load times and the rest of the work is handled by you’re CPU, RAM and GPUs once that’s done. So the difference might be quite negligible.
It is also all about bottlenecks. You might have the fastest disk drives, but you need to make sure that you have the fastest interfaces as well before you can make use of those speeds. It is definitely more common to have SATA III available on most motherboards when compared to M.2 PCIe slots on older machines and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 only available on the very latest.
Internal SSDs also tend to be available at bigger capacities. The Firecuda 120 SSD is available at up to 4TB, while most other drives go up to 2 TB.
And finally, the other interfaces might just be too expensive. The FireCuda 120 SSD retails for S$165 (500GB), S$259 (1TB), S$499 (2TB) and S$899 (4TB) on Shopee and on Lazada. M.2 PCIe and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 drives that actually hit those high speeds can easily cost up to four times that amount for the same capacity.
In conclusion the Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD is a great way to upgrade your gaming rig that will up your performance, destroy the opposition and not your bank account.
Its 5 year warranty also means that you’ve got yourself a drive that will last you quite a while before you look for your next upgrade.