Seagate FireCuda PCIe 5.0 SSD appears to have old firmware, may overheat

The Seagate FireCuda 540-PCIe 5.0 SSD can overheat and shut down during intensive use. It has been known since May that such PCIe 5.0 SSDs can overheat. The FireCuda 540 was released in late June.

Like other current PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the Seagate FireCuda 540 SSD, announced at the end of June, uses the Phison E26 controller. In mid-May it turned out that the controller in certain SSDs can overheat and switch off. The PC will only work again after a complete reboot. The SSD also does not throttle to prevent overheating. Phison already acknowledged the error at the time and indicated that it was working on a fix.

Corsair’s SSDs, among others, are equipped with updated firmware in which the bug has been resolved, but the FireCuda 540 still has the old firmware, including the bug. In tests from ComputerBase This SSD also crashes within two minutes on a CrystalDiskMark benchmark, at a temperature of 87 degrees Celsius.

It is not clear why Seagate decided to announce and release the SSD with the outdated firmware, even though it had been known for over a month that the SSD could overheat during intensive use. ComputerBase asked the SSD maker when the firmware update should be available, but has not yet received a response. The problem does not seem to occur with SSDs with a cooler, such as the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000.