Seagate Coldplay 530 is a product in 2021, it is said that the evaluation time is a little late at this time, but for the friends who have money at the end of the year and want to upgrade their computers should not be in the minority, at this time Coldplay 530 is the highest attention time, so I also decided to do a Coldplay 530 review. In this review, I will not only talk about the position of The ColdPlay 530 in the Seagate product line, the specific performance in the test, but also talk about its performance on different platforms... I will try my best to show you the places that this SSD does not talk about.
The "Coldplay" series with a good reputation
Compared with the previous DIYer familiar barracuda, wolf and other series, FireCuda's history is not long, but the past two years in the market is also relatively high-profile, it also continues Seagate's Chinese name, called ColdPlay, but also for gamers and other high-performance user groups launched. From the product name, you may also guess that the 530 is the third generation of the 5 series. When The Coldplay 510 was launched on the market, everyone still had some doubts about Seagate's consumer flagship SSD, after all, Seagate had gone through the route of hybrid hard drives for a period of time, could it hold the design and manufacture of SSDs? Seagate's performance surprised everyone, unlike other manufacturers, it generously demonstrated the durability parameters of the Coldplay 510, and the 1TB version has 1300TBW, which is also the first-class level of consumer SSDs in the market.
It is Seagate's marketing strategy that not only won the first supporters, but as a professional media, my impression of the Coldplay series is also very good. So when I looked at the review list of PCIe 4.0 SSDs that I reviewed last year, I actually found that it was not on the list, which was obviously intolerable, so I had the idea of making up the review. In addition, Coldplay 530 uses the E18 master of GroupLink, which is also the last release of the four PCIe 4.0 masters, and it is said that its performance on AMD and Intel platforms is also different.
Remarkable speed and lifetime performance
The biggest feature of the Coldplay 530 is that it is also a member of the 7000MB/s club, which is also the first-class speed performance of the current PCIe 4.0 single disk. Although I did not get the 2TB full blood version this time, but it still broke through the 7000MB/s mark in the sequential reading speed, the nominal value published on the official website is 7300MB/s, but the speed on the box is only 7000MB/s, which is actually not only Seagate's reservations, in the actual test I will explain to you why Seagate will be so labeled. The difference between the 1TB and 2TB, 4TB versions is the write speed, with the official nominal value of 1TB being 6000MB/s, and the 2TB and 4TB being 6900MB/s.
If you compare vertically, although ColdPlay 530 is still a PCIe Gen4×4 interface specification and supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol, it has a huge increase over the nominal speed of the previous generation Oflplay 520 with the same plan; if compared with the first generation of PCIe 3.0 Coldplay 510, its speed is 2.12 times beyond; and compared with the 1 series of SATA products, it has more than ten times the speed. Seagate took out The Coldplay 530, which is aimed at performance-sensitive gamers and creative users, in practical applications, gamers need to meet the long-term, high-frequency use of game acceleration, such as anchors have recording, streaming and other higher load storage needs; and for content creators, large-capacity high-speed reading and writing is also a common thing, so Coldplay 530 such high-performance PCIe 4.0 products are supported by a large number of application scenarios.
As Seagate is used to, ColdPlay 530 also announced the product life, which supports 1.8 million hours of MTBF (Average Trouble-Free Working Time), which is actually the overall life index of the SSD, which is a high level of PCIe 4.0 products; in addition, ColdPlay 530 provides a maximum of 5100 TBW, which is actually for the 4TB version, and the TBW of the 1TB version is 1275. This parameter is a measure of the life of flash memory particles, this value and the warranty time provided by the manufacturer is actually combined, taking the 1TB Coldplay 530 as an example, the 5-year limited warranty and 1275TBW either expire, which means that the SSD is out of warranty. From this, it can also be calculated that the DWPD (daily total number of writes) is 0.7, which means that 70% of the full capacity of the disk is written every day for 5 years, which will exceed the warranty conditions. In addition, ColdPlay 530 users can also enjoy a seagate official original factory data rescue service (within three years), which used to be a treatment that only enterprise users can enjoy.
While the standard version I started with doesn't have an attached heatsink, the Seagate Coldplay 530 actually has a version with a thin and light heatsink. It can be seen that the radiator provides a silicone grease layer for the upper and lower sides of the SSD, and the surface also adopts an anodizing process, forming additional micropores on the surface, which plays a role in increasing the heat dissipation area. Such a heat sink is actually prepared for the game book and creation book with a large space, after all, the notebook cannot be installed like a desktop computer with the motherboard cooling armor. In addition, the size of the radiator can also be loaded into the PS5 game console.
The three main parts are all in a first-line configuration
From the design point of view, Coldplay 530 uses the size specifications of M.2 2280, although the official website indicates a double-sided design, but the 1TB version obviously does not need to add so many flash memory particles, and the single-sided design is enough to meet the use. At the beginning of the article, we have mentioned that the master of the hard disk is the group E18 (the master controller we have evaluated many times, the performance will not be repeated), and the ordinary version is different, it has passed the Seagate verification, so it is marked with the Seagate LOGO, the number on the IC is STXZYO1049E0. The cache of the Coldplay 530 uses an SK hynix 1GB DRAM, numbered H5AN8G6NCJ-RVKC, with a specification of DDR4, which is widely used in PCIe 4.0 products and has good adaptability. On the flash memory particles, we can see the FPGA encoding of the IA7BG94AYA, a total of 4 256GB specifications, which together constitute a 1TB capacity. After inquiry, the flash memory particles are the 176-layer 3D TLC flash memory (B47R NAND) of the original magnesium light, and the magnesium particles are applied on their own P5 PLUS, and we have also evaluated them.
Dual-platform testing specially designed for master control
In fact, other media have been released before the coldplay 530 review, but I believe they have not mentioned an important feature of the group E18 - that is, its extreme performance under the AMD and Intel platforms is actually a certain difference. There was plenty of time this time, so I ran a full run on both platforms, and there was actually a lot to say about the test results.
We try to provide the same test conditions for both platforms, but limited by memory, the AMD platform does not support DDR 5 memory, so the difference is mainly on top of this.
First of all, it is still CrystalDiskMark, under the 1GiB test file, you can see that the sequential read time of the Coldplay 530 on the AMD platform reaches 7389MB/s, or even close to 7400MB/s; but in the Intel platform, the sequential read time is only close to 7000MB/s. In terms of writing time, the results of the two are relatively close. In order to verify such a problem, I ran The CrystalDiskMark many times in a row, and the results obtained are relatively close, which shows that the strategy of the group E18 for sequential reading speed on the AMD platform is more aggressive, and the specific reason is that I will ask the engineering and technical personnel of the upstream manufacturers of the industry chain and continue to pay attention. In addition, you can see that the Intel platform has certain advantages in 4K random write, and I will expand on this issue in AS SSD next.
Here, it has to be mentioned that the "7000MB/s" marked on the Package of The Coldplay 530, Seagate's product strategy is still to take the "frank" road, even if it is not a secret difference in the sequential reading speed on the Intel platform.
The 64GiB test, in addition to the Intel platform in the sequential write speed slightly reduced, basically maintained the performance of the 1 GiB test, indicating that the coldplay 530 performance under large file load is relatively stable.
The sequential read and write score of the AS SSD Benchmark is similar to that of CrystalDiskMark, and the Intel platform is slightly lower than the AMD platform, but in the 4K random read and write test, the Intel platform is ahead of the AMD platform. Therefore, the group E18 is not specifically optimized for the AMD platform, but the strategy of calling the SSD on the instruction set of the respective platforms is different. Such differences are reflected in practical applications, in fact, can also be said, such as game users, daily more application scenarios are the ability to accelerate repeated reading, game anchor transcoding, recording and streaming, involving more fragmented files, content creation users and some industrial depth design, the call of storage resources is more complex, but most of them are biased towards the reading and writing of random data.
10GB large file test, is still the Intel platform sequential write speed of about 300MB / s speed drop, there is another test project I also said here: the intel platform latency is lower than the AMD platform, especially the write test items lead more, how much of the advantage is DDR5 memory, and the higher frequency of memory brought about, I do not have more platforms to verify, interested friends can be further verified on their own test platform.
In Anvil's Storage Utilities test, it can be seen that the testing of the Intel platform is generally ahead of the AMD platform, because the weights of the tested projects are different, and the software prefers 4K random read and write projects. In addition, under the use of 1GB files and 32GB, the total score of both has decreased to a certain extent, the AMD platform difference is mainly in the 128K fragmented file reading, and the Intel platform difference is in the low-bit depth 4K and Seq 4MB (sequential) project reading.
ATTO Disk Benchmark mainly tests the read and write speed of files of different sizes, and it can be seen that the maximum read speed of the AMD platform is ahead of the Intel platform, but it can release maximum performance when the file is read at 128K, and Intel only reaches the maximum read speed at 256K.
The HD Tune Pro File Benchmark test also illustrates the results of our above test, which can be seen that the sequential read and write speed of the AMD platform is higher than that of the Intel platform, and the 4K random read and write is the Intel platform that surpasses the AMD platform. It's a little sad that HD Tune Pro is an older test software that interrupted the 4K random multithreaded project before it was finished.
In the HD Tune Pro full disk write test, we can see that it has been written until the position of nearly 800GB to enter the slow, and the amplitude of the speed reduction is not large, indicating that the strategy design of the master is still quite effective, and the 1GB cache can fully support 1TB SSD for writing massive files.
In the PCMark 8's storage performance test, the ColdPlay 530 scored more than 5100 points, which is very positive. This test introduces a number of adobe and Microsoft Office tests, especially Photoshop, Indesign, Affer Effects and other design software, which have relatively high requirements for read and write speed, Photoshop's overload test, generally rarely can control the time within 350s. The product that can generally break through 5100 points is definitely the performance of flagship products on the market.
Convenient hard disk management software
Finally, let me briefly talk about the DiscWizard and SeaTools hard disk management software provided by Seagate for the ColdPlay 530: DiscWizard is a clone software that can also perform some deep operations such as partitioning and backup, so that users do not have to seek help from third-party software; SeaTools' main function is to monitor and diagnose hard disks, and can be specially optimized for Seagate's hard disks. In particular, the diagnostic function, Seagate offers 6 different ways, or quite comprehensive.
EF reviews
In this review, I conducted a rather interesting dual-platform test on The Coldplay 530 and came up with a certain basic judgment. Only from the perspective of the product itself, Seagate has adjusted the ColdPlay 530 quite well, and it can also be regarded as tapping the potential of the master control, and the consistency of multiple tests is also quite high. The reason why I recommend Seagate is because the brand's direct style of "saying something" basically does not exaggerate the performance of the product.