Battle of M.2's ( Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB vs. Western Digital Black SN850 2TB ) torn between both. Give me Pro's and Con's

Code_Man

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I am torn between Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB and WD Black SN850 2TB for storage options. Mostly for the boot drive, but could be for extra storage as well. Could I get some pro's and con's on these storage options?

MOBO: Aorus X570s Master chipset

Thanks,
 
I've got a WD Black SN850 (500gb version), and it's fast. I decided to get a 2nd one and raid them because at the time I couldn't afford the 1Tb. Have no clue about the Firecuda, but I do know the Phison controller run hot as hell. I had a PNY M.2 drive with the Phison controller and I had to add a sink to it along with a 60mm fan to keep it cool.

Out of the two you posted, I'd still go with the WD Black SN850.
 
I am torn between Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB and WD Black SN850 2TB for storage options. Mostly for the boot drive, but could be for extra storage as well. Could I get some pro's and con's on these storage options?

MOBO: Aorus X570s Master chipset

Thanks,
I have the same motherboard as you. Go with the SN850 2TB if you want really good performance RW running off the chipset. The Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB is great for endurance. it has 3600TBW write endurance. I have X570S Aorus master and iam running 2 x 2TB SN850's i get about 6500MB/s Read and the rated 5100MB/s or so on the writes consistently. I had issue with other NVME drives not running anywhere close to their rated speeds when running off the chipset m.2 slots. You can put anyting in the CPU m.2 slot and it will run fine.
 
Yes, I'm watching a video that's stating the Cuda has a cache problem if overheated. Need to monitor that kind of traffic. In my past IT jobs, I've witness Seagate drives failing left and right, but WD always worked for me.
 
I really like Seagate firecuda drives because they have a great software called seatools that works in Windows and Linux really well.
 
The WD SN850 and Samsung 980Pro were the top contenders of PCIe Gen4, but imo the Seagate Firecuda 520 with the Phison E16 controller and the newer SK Hynix P41 (this would be my pick) are more evolved NVMEs, imo better than two before, weather you will notice how much better... its very unlikely.
 
The WD SN850 and Samsung 980Pro were the top contenders of PCIe Gen4, but imo the Seagate Firecuda 520 with the Phison E16 controller and the newer SK Hynix P41 (this would be my pick) are more evolved NVMEs, imo better than two before, weather you will notice how much better... its very unlikely.
Its more about the drives firmware when getting good performance off the chipset
 
I am torn between Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB and WD Black SN850 2TB for storage options. Mostly for the boot drive, but could be for extra storage as well. Could I get some pro's and con's on these storage options?

MOBO: Aorus X570s Master chipset

Thanks,
The SN850 should be strictly better than the Firecuda 520. The 530 would be the competitor for the SN850.
 
2TB fills up pretty fast is all I know I mean I have about 40 Steam games installed pretty much full.
 
Unless you boot using a good stopwatch you'll never know the difference. I'd challenge most people to subjectively tell the difference between a SATA drive and a PCIe 4 NVMe drive doing most things, and most people would fail the challenge. Content creators might be the exception.

(I do database server work on a box with a SATA MX500 and a Samsung 980 Pro. The PCIe 4.0 drive wins by a few minutes running an hour-long test; the rest of the time they feel the same. The 980 Pro only really pulls away doing very large (10's of GB or more) sequential reads or writes; most people simply don't do that sort of thing very often.)
 
Unless you boot using a good stopwatch you'll never know the difference. I'd challenge most people to subjectively tell the difference between a SATA drive and a PCIe 4 NVMe drive doing most things, and most people would fail the challenge. Content creators might be the exception.

I think that could be true, but I also feel that the difference between a cheap nvme drive and a good one could be felt over time/use, getting close to all used, not all the time in something we talk second during a task, but little hang out, non responsiveness occurring more often. Not something that can be implemented in a review/test bench that easily. I could be talking non-sense and magic here.
 
I can tell the difference from a SATA drive in games (loading can be very noticeable. But also, some games don't stream in area data very well, on a SATA drive).

I can also notice the difference on Windows startup and also when loading MS Edge (I have Edge set to re-open all of my previous tabs). However, its not a life changing difference.

And of course, copying large videos or lots of pictures, from one drive to another, which is a substantial speed boost.
 
PCIE4 M.2 really comes in handy when doing large file transfers over a 10gbps network connection.
 
PCIE4 M.2 really comes in handy when doing large file transfers over a 10gbps network connection.
10GbE is only 1GB/sec, pretty much any NVME that can do 1GB/sec read/write will be more than enough for that connection.

CrystalDiskMark_Samsung_980_Pro-2TB.png
 
The SN850 is the first NVMe drive I've had that has actually matched the specsheet. I just slapped it in my Framework, put Windows 11 on and ran Crystaldisk and pow 6970MBps+ out of the box. The random were awesome too.

Though as mentioned, you wont tell the difference between it and a budget NVMe in real use.
 
WD4ME, hahaha :D

Been using them for many, many years, nevanottaproblemo ! I've tried almost every brand and every price point out there, and some are ok, others not so much, but WD has been consistently excellent for me....

Currently have 9 of 'em in da house on 3 different rigs with various mobo's/cpu/gpu combos..... 4x SN750's and 5x SN850's, plus many, many moar that I have put into client & family builds with absolutely ZERO complaints !
 
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