This 2TB SSD with heatsink is the ultimate PC or PS5 upgrade for £126
Seagate's FireCuda 530 is available at a historic low price.
The Seagate FireCuda 530 is one of the best NVMe SSDs for PC and PS5, and today you can pick up the 2TB heatsink model for just £126. That's an awesome price for one of the very fastest SSDs on the market, one that's on par with our favourite favourite PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming, the Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN850. Normally we'd expect to pay closer to £160 for this model, making it a solid £30+ savings.
Let's quickly run through the speeds and feeds for this model so you know what you're turning in your hard-earned dollarydoos for. The drive is rated for a maximum sequential read speed of 7300MB/s, with a slightly slower max write speed of 6900MB/s. Random performance, ie how fast the drive reads lots of disparate small files, is also excellent, with ratings of 1,000,000 IOPS (1M!) for both reads and writes in this capacity.
On all counts then, this is a top SSD when it comes to speed, and that's been borne out in my testing too - which sees the FireCuda 530 mentioned in the same breath as the Samsung 980 Pro and WD SN850 which we often recommend for high-end systems. The successors to those drives, the 990 Pro and WD SN850x, have a very slight advantage in rated speed compared to the FireCuda 530, but are imperceptibly faster (or the same speed) in real-world use.
If you're considering this drive for PC use, you'll want to make sure that your motherboard or laptop meets the PCIe 4.0 standard. That includes most models released in the last three or four years, but you can always Google the name of your laptop or desktop motherboard and check the manufacturer's product page to see if you have the requisite hardware. If your motherboard uses the slightly older PCIe 3.0 spec, then as PCIe is forwards and backwards compatible, you can still use this drive but with reduced bandwidth, which translates into a relatively minor drop in real-world performance. If you have a brand new motherboard that supports PCIe 5.0, then this drive will work at its full speed - and PCIe 5.0 drives aren't actually faster in real-world use (so far), so you can rest assured you're getting an awesome drive for the money.
For the PS5, the calculus is way simpler: this is one of the very best SSDs available to expand your storage, and it exceeds all of Sony's requirements for speed and size, while the specially-designed heatsink fits the available space perfectly. Highly recommended then, and the only reason I'd recommend something different is if you could find the heatsink versions of the 980 Pro, 990 Pro, SN850 or SN850x at a lower price for the same capacity - which currently isn't possible, in the UK at least.
Overall then, highly recommended for both PC and PS5, so do check some reviews and then hit up that RPS-tagged link above!
