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Our review of Seagate’s latest FireCuda Gen4 DRAMless consumer SSD has left us somewhat perplexed, and quite frankly, a little surprised. Until we examined the controller used in this drive, we had long assumed that Seagate and Phison maintained a strategic, long-term partnership across their SSD product lines. This release appears to mark a significant departure from that relationship.
Rather than continuing with a familiar Phison-based design, Seagate has introduced what appears to be a somewhat lesser known SSD controller to the consumer market: the Tenafe TC2201, a Gen4 DRAMless 4-channel NVMe SSD controller. The move represents a notable shift in Seagate’s SSD strategy and raises interesting questions about the company’s future direction in the storage space.
We had never heard of Tenafe before this review and have since learned that Tenafe was formed in 2019 by a team of industry professionals and presently has offices in California and China. They specialize in client and enterprise SSD solutions to include SSD, BGA and CFExpress. Tenafe began sampling in 2021 and this is one of few public representations of their product. Let’s take a look!
The Seagate FireCuda X1070 is a Gen4 form factor 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) SSD that uses a somewhat outdated NVMe 1.4 SSD operating protocol. It is available in 1, 2 and 4TB capacities and we are testing their 2TB sample today. Performance specs listed for this SSD are as shown in this below chart:
The Seagate FireCuda X1070 contains the Tenafe TC2201 4-channel Gen4 DRAM-less NVMe SSD controller along with two pieces of what appears to be Micron G8 232-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory running at 2400MT/s.
This is a single-sided SSD and, as specs validate in the chart above, it is very power efficient during active use which might just make the FireCuda X1070 and ideal SSD for ultras and laptops.
The Seagate FireCuda comes with a coupon for a free 1 month XBOX Game Pass and Seagate Tools is also available free of charge to help maintain the life of your SSD.
The FireCuda X1070 comes with a 5-year limited warranty and can be found at Amazon for $223 (1TB), $459 (2TB) and $829 for the 4TB capacity. This is very concerning considering the Samsung SSD 9100 4TB Gen5 SSD was priced at $799 at the time of this report being published. Add to that the fact that the Samsung is also a premium DRAM-based Gen5 SSD whereas the X1070 is what should be a ‘value-based’ DRAMless Gen4 SSD.
Let’s take a look at the performance…