In time for the holiday season, Seagate has introduced three new Star Wars-inspired external hard drives to add to its existing lineup of HDDs inspired by a galaxy far, far away. The new drives carry images of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Han Solo and join an existing lineup which contains products based on Boba Fett, Grogu and the Mandalorian. The drives are reimagined flavors of the company's FireCuda Gaming Hard Drives with a 2TB capacity, customizable red lighting, and reasonable price.
Just like other collectible external hard drives from Seagate, the new Star Wars-themed special edition products pack a 2.5-inch, 5,400-RPM HDD featuring shingled magnetic recording and rated for up to 140 MB/s data transfer rate, which is the maximum speed these drives are capable of.
Given that we are dealing with SMR HDDs, they are can be expected to be a little slow when doing overwriting of shingled zones (all SMR drives have both shingled and non-shingled bands) and have reduced performance when the drive moves data from non-shingled (CMR) to shingled bands. Overwriting is arguably not the most commonly used operation on external storage device used to store content, but when an SMR drive starts to move data from CMR to SMR zones, its performance slows even data is copied to this HDD.
Meanwhile, Seagate's Star Wars drives feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gb/s) Micro-B interface and come with an appropriate cable to maintain compatibility with a wide range of systems. If you want faster speeds than any external hard drive can offer, we recommend checking our list of best external SSDs or putting an existing drive in one of the best SSD enclosures.
Although Seagate's HDDs with Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Han Solo on their chassis are not performance champs, they will still be appealing to Star Wars fans who want to store their content on an inexpensive external storage solution. To make them even more alluring, they feature customizable RGB LED lighting that is configured to remind of the characters: a forceful blue for Luke Skywalker, a wrathful red for Darth Vader, and a white glow reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon for Han Solo.
The new Seagate collectible Star Wars drives with Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Han Solo are available today for $109.99 from Amazon. At press time, Newegg charged $175.99 for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo HDDs.
