FireCuda is Seagate's consumer performance badge, and this page covers its M.2 NVMe drives only - the 530, 530R, X1070, 520 and 520N. The cheapest FireCuda that fits a standard 2280 slot right now is the FireCuda 530 at 1TB, $160.00 per terabyte. Two things decide whether the cheapest row is the right buy: the M.2 length, because a 2230 module will not fill a desktop or PS5 slot, and the NAND type, because the newer X1070 is QLC where the 530 is TLC.
Prices updated · live figures update every 4-5 hours
Ranked by live cost per terabyte as of 2026-08-14. Check the length column before you buy - a 2230 drive will not fill a standard 2280 slot.
| Drive | Capacity | NAND | Endurance | Length | Heatsink | Price | Per TB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FireCuda 530 · refurb | 1 TB | TLC | 1,275 TBW | M.2 2280 | No | $160 | $160 | Buy |
| FireCuda 520 | 2 TB | - | - | M.2 2280 | No | $400 | $200 | Buy |
| FireCuda X1070 | 4 TB | QLC | - | M.2 2280 | No | $830 | $208 | Buy |
| FireCuda X1070 | 2 TB | QLC | - | M.2 2280 | No | $460 | $230 | Buy |
| FireCuda 530 · refurb | 1 TB | TLC | 1,275 TBW | M.2 2280 | Yes | $297 | $297 | Buy |
| FireCuda 520 · refurb | 1 TB | - | - | M.2 2280 | No | $362 | $362 | Buy |
Cheapest per terabyte first. NAND type and endurance are read from the manufacturer's own listing text; a dash means the listing did not state it and we have not guessed.
| Line | Capacities in stock | NAND | Endurance | Length | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FireCuda 530 | 1TB | TLC | 1,275 TBW at 1TB | M.2 2280 | $160/TB |
| FireCuda 520 | 1TB, 2TB | - | - | M.2 2280 | $200/TB |
| FireCuda X1070 | 2TB, 4TB | QLC | - | M.2 2280 | $208/TB |
FireCuda is Seagate's consumer performance badge, and it is worth knowing up front that Seagate has attached it to more than one kind of product. The drives on this page are the M.2 NVMe solid state drives - the 530, the 530R, the newer X1070, and the older 520 and 520N. Those are one comparable class, and ranking them against each other by cost per terabyte tells you something real.
The badge has also been used on a portable external SSD and, historically, on the FireCuda SSHD - a conventional spinning hard drive with a small flash cache bolted on. That last one still appears in search results and still sells, and it lists at roughly half the per-terabyte price of the NVMe drives on this page. It is not a bargain version of them. It is a hard drive, and putting it in the same table would place a mechanical disk at the top of a solid state ranking. We exclude it here rather than let a per-terabyte column imply a comparison that does not exist.
So this page is narrower than the brand. That is deliberate, and it is the only way the numbers below mean anything.
Two separate things push the wrong drive to the top of a cost-per-terabyte ranking in this family, and the tables above flag both.
The first is physical length. M.2 drives come in several lengths, and the number in the name is the size in millimetres - a 2280 module is 22mm wide and 80mm long, a 2230 is the same width and 30mm long. The 2230 modules exist because handhelds need them: the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally and some Microsoft Surface machines take a 2230 and nothing longer. Desktop motherboards and the PlayStation 5 expansion bay take 2280. A 2230 drive is frequently the cheapest per terabyte in a family, and it is cheap for the ordinary reason that fewer buyers can use it. If you drop one into a 2280 slot it will seat in the connector but reach nowhere near the mounting standoff, and it needs an adapter bracket to sit safely.
The second is the memory itself. Solid state drives store bits at different densities, and the trade is always the same: more bits per cell means cheaper per terabyte and lower write endurance. Seagate states the NAND type in its own listing text for some of these lines, and where it does, our decoder shows it. Where a line's listing does not say, we print a dash rather than infer it from the price - inferring QLC from cheapness is exactly the kind of guess that gets repeated as fact.
The practical version: read the length column, then the NAND column, then the per-terabyte figure. In that order.
Every drive here carries a TBW rating - terabytes written - which is the manufacturer's stated figure for how much data can be written to the drive over its warranty. It is a warranty boundary rather than a failure prediction, and drives routinely exceed it, but it is the closest thing to a comparable durability number that manufacturers publish.
TBW scales with capacity, so a bare TBW figure means nothing without the capacity attached to it. Our decoder always shows the two together for that reason. A 4TB drive rated for several thousand TBW and a 1TB drive rated for a little over a thousand may well be the same platform.
One detail worth pausing on, because it runs against the obvious assumption: a refreshed model is not automatically the more durable one. Where our table shows two generations of the same line at the same capacity, compare the TBW figures directly rather than assuming the newer letter is an upgrade. Refreshes change controllers, NAND suppliers and cost structures, and endurance can move in either direction.
For most people this matters less than it sounds. A typical desktop writes a small fraction of a modern drive's rating in years of use. It matters a great deal if the drive is going into something that writes constantly - a scratch disk for video work, a database, a download cache.
A good share of FireCuda sales are PS5 expansion drives, and the console has firm requirements: an M.2 NVMe drive of 2280 length or shorter with an appropriate mounting position, and Sony's guidance calls for a heatsink because the expansion bay has no airflow of its own.
Some FireCuda parts ship with a heatsink already fitted and some do not, and the two versions of the same capacity carry different part numbers and different prices. Our table has a heatsink column so you are not inferring it from the photograph. If you buy the bare version for a PS5 you will need to add a heatsink yourself, and the aftermarket ones are cheap - so a bare drive plus a heatsink is sometimes the better buy than the factory heatsink version, depending on what the gap between them is on the day.
That gap is worth checking rather than assuming. The heatsink version of a capacity is not always priced sensibly against the bare one, and when the difference is large it is usually the listing rather than the hardware that has moved.
Our dedicated PS5 storage pages cover the console's requirements in more detail and compare across brands rather than within one.
Every figure here is the cheapest live listing we hold for that drive at the moment you loaded the page. Cost per terabyte is price divided by advertised capacity.
This family is small and thinly stocked compared to the enterprise hard drive lines we track, which has a specific consequence: a single seller can hold the only listing for a capacity, and a single-seller price is not a market price. Where a listing sits far above the family's own median we mark it, and we exclude it from any cheapest callout, but the marking is a warning rather than a filter - the row stays visible so you can see what is happening.
New and refurbished are tracked separately, as everywhere on this site, and a refurbished price is never used to fill a gap on the new side.
Multi-pack listings are excluded. On a related note, one piece of catalogue history worth recording: two of these drives sat in our catalogue for months described as four-packs, because a title parse had read the PCIe Gen4 lane notation - the phrase reads Gen4 by four - as a pack quantity. They are ordinary single drives. That defect is fixed, and it is the reason we now check a suspicious multiplier against the full listing title rather than trusting the parsed field.
PS5 SSD upgrades compares expansion drives across brands and covers the console's requirements · Seagate BarraCuda is the desktop hard drive line under the same maker · Seagate Exos is the enterprise line · Ultrastar SSD covers enterprise U.2 and SAS flash, where endurance is rated in drive writes per day rather than a single TBW figure.
They are different generations with different memory. Seagate's own listing text describes the 530 as 3D TLC NAND and the X1070 as 3D QLC NAND. QLC stores more bits per cell, which makes it cheaper per terabyte and gives it lower write endurance for the same capacity. The X1070 currently undercuts the 530 per terabyte in our table, and that is a NAND-type difference rather than a discount on the same product.
No, not without an adapter. The 520N is an M.2 2230 module - 30mm long instead of 80mm - built for handhelds like the Steam Deck and for some Surface machines. It will seat in a 2280 slot's connector but will not reach the mounting standoff, leaving the drive unsupported. It is often the cheapest FireCuda per terabyte for exactly this reason: fewer buyers can use it. For a desktop or a PS5 you want a 2280 part.
The PS5 expansion bay has no dedicated airflow and Sony's guidance calls for a heatsink, so yes, the drive needs one - but not necessarily a factory-fitted one. A bare drive plus an aftermarket heatsink is a valid route and is sometimes cheaper than the version that ships with one. Our table shows which listings include a heatsink so you can compare the two properly rather than guessing from the product photo.
No, and this is the most common confusion around the badge. The FireCuda SSHD is a spinning hard drive with a small flash cache - a mechanical drive, not a solid state one. It lists at roughly half the per-terabyte price of the NVMe drives here, which makes it look like a bargain in a badge-wide search. It is a different product class and we deliberately exclude it from these tables rather than let a shared column imply a comparison.
Terabytes written - the manufacturer's stated write volume over the warranty period. It is a warranty boundary rather than a failure point, and it always scales with capacity, so it is only meaningful quoted alongside the capacity it applies to. For ordinary desktop use you are very unlikely to approach it. It matters if the drive is a scratch disk for video editing, a database volume, or anything else that writes continuously.
Not automatically, and the endurance figures are where you can see it. A refresh changes controllers, NAND suppliers and cost structures, and the stated TBW can move down as well as up. Compare the figures in the decoder directly at the same capacity rather than assuming the later letter is an upgrade.
Each of these carries the same live pricing and, where the family mixes recording technologies or interfaces, the same per-model decoder.
CMR drive list · Recertified guide · NAS devices · External drives
Specification claims on this page were checked against the pages below on 4 August 2026. Where a widely-repeated figure did not survive that check, we report what the source says now and say so in the text rather than repeating the familiar number.