Today we are taking a look at the Seagate Barracuda 510 1TB SSD. The Barracuda 510 is a midrange brand at Seagate, and this is a TLC-based PCIe 3.0 SSD that is situated between their lower-end QLC products and their higher-end Firecuda line. The underlying hardware on this Barracuda 510 should be familiar to anyone who has been reading our reviews a while; a Phison PS5012-E12 controller, DRAM cache, and Toshiba 96L TLC NAND are the building blocks for this drive. Let us dive in and see how the Barracuda 510 stacks up.
Seagate Barracuda 510 1TB NVMe SSD
The Seagate Barracuda 510 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
Beneath the product label is the Phison PS5012-E12 controller, four NAND packages, and a DRAM cache. The E12 controller is a variant of the E12S controller used on the Inland Premium 1TB drive we recently covered, and that drive was a very good performer. The E12 controller is an 8-channel controller for TLC NAND, here it is mated to Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 TLC NAND. A 512MB DDR4 cache is also present on the drive, which represents another minor deviation from the Inland drive which used a DDR3 cache.
The back of this single-sided drive contains nothing but unused pads. The 1TB model is the top SKU of the Barracuda 510 line, but it is possible this PCB design is shared with other model drives.
Seagate Barracuda 510 SSD Specs
The Seagate Barracuda 510 line of SSDs is available from 250GB to 1TB.
Our 1TB SKU represents the top of this product stack, with the best-rated performance at 3400 MB/s sequential read and 3000 MB/s sequential write. These rated specs are slightly higher than the Inland Premium drive, though not by much. The Seagate also comes with a 5-year warranty in comparison to 3 years on the Inland drive. On the other hand, Inland warrantied their drive for 1600 TBW endurance while Seagate has the Barracuda 510 at 640TBW, a much less exciting number.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Seagate Barracuda 510 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
