Seagate has been one of the top names in the storage industry for decades, but its almost exclusively for their hard drives. The company has been largely absent from the consumer SSD market, and their enterprise SSDs have never particularly stood out above the competition. By comparison, rival Western Digital managed to acquire SanDisk and with it a 50% stake in one of the largest NAND flash manufacturers. Seagates acquisitions have been less fruitful: they bought controller designer SandForce right around when SandForce drives disappeared from the market for good. Since then, Seagate has had to buy controllers and NAND on the open market and provide product differentiation through firmware or by integrating their drives into storage appliances.

But, after over five years since we last reviewed a Seagate consumer SSD, Seagate is bacl. Earlier this year the company re-entered the consumer SSD market with their BarraCuda SATA SSD, and today were taking a look at it. Seagates new drive adopts Toshibas 3D TLC NAND, but is held back by the outdated Phison S10 controller.