I have a Seagate FireCuda 530 2 TB NVMe SSD (ZP2000GM30023) and experienced a strange issue with read performance. Files which had not been accessed recently were very slow to access. Even sequential reads were glacially slow, akin to a USB flash drive with access times spiking like crazy.

This appears to be a firmware bug with the Segate devices, but Seagate does a poor job of advertising where to get firmware. If you’re affected, update to firwmare version SU6SM005 by doing the following:

1. Download SeaTools from here
2. Click on the “Advanced” tab once launched, it’ll give you the serial number
3. Return to the SeaTools download page, there’s a Firmware Downloads widget on the side. Insert your serial number into that
4. Download the firmware update ZIP and extract it
5. Select the affected drive in SeaTools and then click “Firmware Update”
6. Browse to the new .bin file and hit Ok
7. The firmware update should complete within a few seconds

Subsequent to this I formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows onto another drive since I wasn’t sure whether this would fix the issue. After formatting, I 80% filled the drive with large files and left them there for months.

After letting them age on the drive, I copied them to another SSD and the read performance was extremely fast. Therefore it seems the firmware update has resolved the issue and I would suggest this to anyone having issues.