Seagate’s IronWolf 510 NVMe SSD is a fast reader with an excellent endurance rating, but it’s a very slow, albeit hyper-steady writer. When I say slow, I’m talking less than 1GBps for the 1.92TB capacity I tested. If you read the specs from Seagate’s website, that’s exactly what it’s rated for.<\/p>\n

For PCs, writing this slow would be a buy-me-not issue. However, with the NAS boxes this drive is intended for, it’s not a problem. Even supposing a 10Gbps Ethernet connection, the pipe feeding NAS boxes is limited to around 1GBps. Ergo, the IronWolf 510’s sustained write speed is plenty fast enough for its intended role.<\/p>\n

There’s a caveat concerning capacity though. The same spec table rates the 480GB IronWolf 510 for 600MBps writing and the 240GB capacity for 290MBps. Those drives could bottleneck anything less than a 10Gbps network connection.<\/p>\n

Specs<\/h2>\n

The IronWolf 510 is a double-sided (stacked TLC\/3-bit NAND on both sides) NVMe, x4 PCI 3 SSD available in 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacities. Those capacities, rather then 256GB, 512GB, etc. mean that the drives are heavily over-provisioned. I.e., there’s a lot of NAND set aside for replacing worn out blocks. Indeed, the drives are rated for 435TBW for every 240GB of capacity, roughly three times the rating of end-user drives They are also covered by a five-year warranty and a three-year data recovery plan. Nice.<\/p>\n

Pricing is, of course, matched to the extended support and TBW ratings with the 1.92GB drive weighing in at not inconsequential $450, and the 480GB at $240 on Amazon at the time of this writing. You’re paying for peace of mind over the long haul.<\/p>\n

Performance<\/h2>\n

I gave away most of this part of the story in the opening paragraph. As you’ll see below, the IronWolf 510 aced the read tests. They’re as good as you’ll see from a PCIe 3 SSD. The write performance on the other hand, can only be described as turtle-like. Even though there’s a DRAM on board, it’s almost as if the drive is primarily writing directly to the NAND. Slow but super steady.<\/p>\n

For whatever the reasons, the IronWolf 510 is perfectly matched in performance to the limitations of the common NAS box. Perhaps the extra cycles are used for advance error correction.<\/p>\n