Seagate BarraCuda 530 SSD breaks cover with 7,400 MB/s speeds — Still PCIe 4.0, but looks like a significant upgrade over the previous 520 | Tom’s Hardware

Seagate has expanded the brand’s SSD lineup with a new BarraCuda 530. The PCIe 4.0 SSD, which appears to be an upgrade over the BarraCuda 520, is an M.2 2280 drive that will compete with the best SSDs on the market.

While the 530 SSD is still a PCIe 4.0 x4 drive like its predecessor, Seagate has upgraded it to NVMe 2.0, a step up from the BarraCuda 520’s NVMe 1.4 specification. Details are very slim now, since Seagate only recently listed the BarraCudea 530 on the company’s website, without making a formal announcement. However, the SSD is likely using a Phison PCIe 4.0 SSD controller and 3D TLC NAND; we don’t know the specific models yet.

Seagate presently sells the BarraCuda 530 in capacities of 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The BarraCuda 520 was available at 4TB, so that the brand will likely offer the same capacity as the BarraCuda 530 in the future. In the meantime, the new drive’s maximum capacity is 2 TB.

On paper at least, Seagate has substantially improved the performance of the BarraCuda 530. At the highest capacity, the drive delivers sequential read and write performance up to 7,400 MB/s and 6,400 MB/s, respectively. The BarraCuda 530 has 48% higher sequential reads and 52% higher sequential writes than the existing BarraCuda 520. Seagate doesn’t share the random performance metrics for either SSD, so we couldn’t see how that has progressed.

The power consumption hasn’t changed much. The average idle power (S3) draw is 50 mW, the same for both drives. The maximum average active power, on the other hand, is slightly different, depending on the capacity. The BarraCuda 530 2TB and the BarraCuda 520 draw the same amount of power (5.7W), whereas the BarraCuda 530 1TB and 512GB pull 4% and 6% more power, respectively.

On the contrary, the endurance of the BarraCuda 530 has got a lot better. The 2TB model is suitable for 1,200 TBW, while the 1TB and 512GB versions flaunt 600 TBW and 300 TBW, respectively. That’s over two times higher endurance on the 2TB and 1TB drives and 1.5X on the 512GB one.

Seagate provides a limited five-year warranty for the BarraCuda 530. Since the company hasn’t officially revealed the new lineup, we don’t know the pricing for the drives yet. Given the listings, Seagate won’t likely take long to announce the new SSD to the public.

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.