Five-dimensional (5D) seismic data reconstruction becomes more appealing in recent years because it takes advantage of five physical dimensions of the seismic data and can reconstruct data with large gap. The low-rank approximation approach is one of the most effective methods for reconstructing 5D dataset. However, the main disadvantage of the low-rank approximation method is its low computational efficiency because of many singular value decompositions (SVD) of the block Hankel/Toeplitz matrix in the frequency domain. In this paper, we develop an SVD-free low-rank approximation method for efficient and effective reconstruction and denoising of the seismic data that contain four spatial dimensions. Our SVD-free rank constraint model is based on an alternating minimization strategy, which updates one variable each time while fixing the other two. For each update, we only need to solve a linear least-squares problem with much less expensive QR factorization. The SVD-based and SVD-free low-rank approximation methods in the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) framework are compared in detail, regarding the reconstruction performance and computational cost. The comparison shows that the SVD-free low-rank approximation method can obtain similar reconstruction performance as the SVD-based method but with a large computational speedup.