Seagate Firecuda 520 500GB Performance Internal Solid State Drive SSD PCIe Gen4 X4 NVMe 1.3 for Gaming PC Gaming Laptop Desktop - 3-year Rescue Service (ZP500GM3A002)

Pros: Fast read speeds, getting a few MB away from 5,000MB/sec reads in Crystal Disk Mark.

Cons: Not sure of any cons yet, except the model I got was only 500GB.

Overall Review: I would recommend this to others in a heartbeat. Speeds are incredible. The drive is no longer the bottleneck it's waiting for the CPU to process what it reads. It's installed in an ASUS TUF 570 PLUS motherboard with a Ryzen 3950X. Very happy with my purchase of this. PCIE 4.0 speeds are as advertised. Very Very close to 5,000MB/sec. Talking like 4,995MB/SEC. Love it. Get one, you'll be happy. I really hope it lasts well now. I've only had it running for a week. Don't expect any problems but I will update the review if there are any.

Pros: I've owned the Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB for about a month now. Absolutely amazing SSD. * Absolutely blazing fast * No massive heatsink to have to remove to fit it under the graphics card

Cons: * Nothing as of yet. Has run flawlessly.

Overall Review: Would definitely recommend this to other people. Seagate for the longest time hadn't really tried to compete in the SSD market, but with their FireCuda series, they have really hit a home run. Admittedly it is with the same E-16 Phison controller that everyone else is using, but I believe they did it right. If you want a good M2.2280 SSD on PCIe 4.0, I believe this is the one to buy right now. If you can wait for drives on the new E-18 Phison controller, it will bring significantly higher IOPS and sequential speeds.

Pros: Crystal Diskmark is able to pull out its peak speed, so the drive functions as advertised. Only really gets hot when operating at its sustained peak speed, but most applications such as games don't sustain a peak read/write speed so it won't become an issue.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: Don't expect every program to get the peak speed all the time. "Real" performance varies from app to app.

Pros: I'm an old school pc builder. But this is just crazy fast. My PC boots from power off to windows desktop in just under 10 seconds. I'm going to buy 2 more but these are going to be 1TB or 2Tb. Awesome!!!

Overall Review: I have always liked Seagate but this is crazy fast.

Pros: Lives up to specs, plug-n-play, runs cool, though I added a cheap heatsink.

Cons: High Price but I paid a premium at x4 release, should drop a bit in time, and software is kind of pointless, don't bother with it unless you want to obsess over % off life expectancy left, which is a guess regardless. Just like any drive if the data on it is important have a backup drive.. I use it for games so, backup and life expectancy nitpicking/guessing is pointless.

Overall Review: Awesome speed, but Evo m.2 x3 is not that much slower. I used an Evo m.2 x3 for my OS install and the m.2 x4 firecuda as my game drive. It is faster by exactly as much as it claims, but I'm not sure the speed difference is all that much in actual use.. I mean can you tell the difference in a 3 second load vrs a 1.5 second load.. you got to be loading multiple gig sized files to tell a difference.

Pros: PCIE 4.0 Fast, fast, fast, FAST!! It's super fast.

Cons: Does not have unlimited space

Overall Review: This drive is my first solid state from Seagate after using Samsung SSD exclusively since 2010-ish. The drive is amazingly fast - I was skeptical of the claims, and thought I was seeing "good speeds" on a couple of Samsung SATA SSD in Raid 0. This little monster crushes the SATA based drives. I copied over 100GB off the SSD array to this drive and it took less than an hour, with the biggest bottleneck being the 1GB ethernet link I had between the two. Gaming from this drive is fantastic - load times have all but disappeared. Daily use is great as well - browsers simply pop open without delay. This drive can get warm, so a heat sink is a must, and active cooling is a good idea. Don't waste your time with SATA based drives, if your board supports PCIE 4.0 and has a port that you can get the full speed from this drive, you won't be disappointed.

Pros: works great. nice packaging and easy install in msi gaming plus x570 motherboard. i wasn't sure if i was supposed to leave the sticker on or not before installing the heat spreader included with my motherboard. it came off easily.

Overall Review: it's been 10+ years since i build a computer before this one, so i'm afraid i don't have a lot to compare it to. it seems stinky fast and was easy to install, so i'm happy.

Pros: -5001.74 seq reads 2519.04 seq writes (Crystalbench) -easy to install and get setup -temps are fine even without a heatsink

Cons: It's not even cheaper?

Overall Review: I would highly recommend one of these at 500gb. I think I'll eventually get another and try to raid them or something.