This is the lowest I have seen by an Australian seller. Amazon has it for $415 from the US. MWave has it now for $879, when I bought from them in June it was $500. No sure if it is a price hike for new stock. There are other sellers selling it for under $500.
I have been using one for a couple of month as my system disk, and it is very fast. It also runs cooler than my Samsung 970.
It is the heatsink!
What does this even have over the 980 pro that's 100 bucks cheaper?
Speed 7,300 vs 3,500 MB/s and Endurance 2,550 vs 600 TBW.
Think you are looking at the wrong model, the 980 Pro has 7000 and 1200 TBW. Half the endurance rating is the reason, that and the 530 has 6000 seq writes vs 5100 on the 980 Pro.
Yes, you are right. I was looking at the 980 (non-pro).
For me the selling factor was the endurance. I keep my computers for long. The highest the TBW the longest the SSD SHOULD last. Similar to MTBF spec in HDs. I had several HDs died on me before they reached 1,000,000 hrs, but I have not had a HD with MTBF of 2,000,000 hrs died on me yet. I know this is very open to discussion, but that was my logic at the time why to pay $80 more for the Seagate.
@OMan: They really aren't similar. MTBF is Mean Time Between Failures which focuses on time as the unit of measure for failure rates, while TBW is a measure of Total Bytes Written and focuses on writes. You can't really compare the two apples to apples. In terms of buying an SSD, keeping a drive for a length of time is less important than how much you actually plan to write to the drive itself before you expect failures to occur. If you want some interesting reading, have a look at the recent Backblaze report which published results that show failure rates for SSD's decrease over time relative to mechanical drives and the current data they have indicates failure is less likely as time goes on compared with first years of ownership (when within the drives TBW at least).
To come back to this example, 2TB at 1200TBW and assuming ownership of 15 years, you would need to write an average of 220GB per day in order to hit the TBW in that timeframe (and how many 15 year old drives do you own that are still in use?). I know I can write that much to my drive in less than an hour, but if i'm being realistic myself (as a power user) and consider my usage averaged out, then it becomes clear that there is simply no way that I could abuse a drive like that, not even within a 20 year timeframe. I have no idea what your personal use case is or your situation so I won't comment there, but for 99% of people, 2500 TBW on an SSD is superfluous.
Add to the above the decreasing costs, increasing speeds and higher capacities of drives over time and it becomes clear that buying the most expensive, longest lasting drive now, is not not as efficient as buying something which meets or just exceeds your needs and upgrading it every 5-10 years, staying mostly within warranty period of the drives you own, and ensuring you have a solution for DR/Backups.
The above is not a dig on the Firecuda, it's is a great drive and will serve those who buy it well, but value wise there are better options out there.
Faster sustained writes (especially after cache depletes), much higher endurance. Not anywhere as high of an improvement as xpoint and other enterprise drives drives VS 980pro etc, but it's $100 more and not $6000 more for 2TB.
For 99% of users the 980 pro is more than enough. Endurance of ~650gb written/day ever single day for 5 years and a large enough cache that's realistically not going to be used up in everyday usage (installing games/software/moving files <100gb).
It costs 30% more for benefits that'll affect only the most extreme power users. I'd say gen 4 drives are overkill in general considering gen 3 drives can't even be saturated by software (besides ps5) but that's a debate for another time.
Gen 5 coming out any day now.
It will be years before they reach full speed potential.
Its 423 on Amazon. I dont know if this is worth it + the delivery
I thought it came with an enclosure for external connection.