The Seagate FireCuda 540 is a fast, reliable PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD that sets itself apart with an excellent warranty. The FireCuda's performance is also good to excellent across the board, including in sustained workloads, which helps gear this drive for future DirectStorage game titles. It requires a PCIe 5.0-capable motherboard to take full advantage, particularly one with built-in M.2 cooling as the drive arrives bare, and pricing is also on the high end. Seagate’s attention to detail on this drive makes it a good fit for workstations, too, if you can apply your own cooling.
The initial instinct is to compare the FireCuda 540 to the Corsair MP700, a drive that shares the same hardware and also goes with the bare-drive approach. The E26’s reference heatsink, used on the Inland TD510, comes with a small fan for active cooling that’s annoying to power, noisy, and generally useless, so doing away with that is a good plan. It also makes sense to let the user decide how to cool the drive, as matching aesthetics is important with high-end machines. Having a different option, as does the Crucial T700 and Gigabyte Aorus 10000, is viable, but Seagate wanted something simple with this drive.
