The gaming market has experienced significant growth over the last decade. In addition to boosting PC sales, the peripherals market associated with the segment has also expanded. Installed sizes for games now regularly run into 100s of GBs, thanks to support for increased resolutions and more detailed graphics. The data also needs to be loaded into memory as fast as possible in order to improve the gaming experience. Gamers want the fastest possible portable SSDs to store their games. It is no surprise that the 20 Gbps transfer rates promised by USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 has an instant appeal in this market segment. Keeping this in mind, many vendors have introduced USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 bus-powered portable SSDs targeting the gaming crowd. Last year, we looked at Western Digital's WD_BLACK P50. Seagate's FireCuda Gaming SSD was available in the market around the same time, but it didn't make it to our testbed in time for that review. We recently got the Seagate offering into our latest testbed, and took the opportunity to refresh the numbers for the WD_BLACK P50 with our latest test suite. Read on for our hands-on review of the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD.
