Seagate Grogu special edition FireCuda external hard drive review – This is the way

Posted on May 16, 2022

I know I’m not the only one out there- I’m a massive Star Wars fan. I just went to a convention and got a picture with the Emperor himself, I’ve driven hours to buy the special edition 4K Blu-ray steelbooks, and plenty more to boot. There are tons of us, and we all have a use for external storage, if only to store our gigabytes of Star Wars fanfics and art. Luckily, some really cool ones just dropped from Seagate, and we’ve gotten our hands on the Grogu themed one to give you the skinny on this fine addition to your collection.

We’ve reviewed a bunch of Seagate external hard drives- we’ve even got plenty of pictures for you to see all the pretty gizmos. These devices are quite handy, small and very portable. It’s so small I was even able to throw it in my front pants pocket when I took it with me to work. It measures out at 0.57” x 3.15” x 4.82”, big enough to feel like you’re getting what you paid for with enough space to add the wonderful Star Wars artwork on the case. It’s also ultra light, weighing in at just over a third of a pound.

In the box is the aforementioned hard drive, weighing in at 2TB. With it is your USB 3.2 Gen 1 cable, and while I could sit here and complain about things that aren’t USB-C (which myself and Editor-In-Chief Ron Burke do on the regular), it doesn’t seem to hamper this hard drive much. In any case, I think we’d all prefer a cable that is more standard, because having to dig around for one of these USB-Micro cables is a pain in the butt, especially if you lose it. While there are issues in the choice of connection, I do like Seagate going with a braided cable – another bonus in taking it on the go making it a bit easier to corral into a pocket, purse, or bag/backpack.

As far as the art goes, it’s absolutely adorable. The matte finish doesn’t take away in the slightest from little Grogu/Baby Yoda/The Child on the front, with his little face staring at you as you add files. Everyone loves showing off their setups, (I for one would love one of the N7 NZXT cases for my computer), but this is a subtle way to show off your Star Wars fandom. I picked up the Grogu drive, but the cool thing is these come in several “flavors”, with a Mandalorian (Din Djarin) one, as well as a Boba Fett-themed drive featuring his iconic spaceship, the Firespray, in the background.

Another added element I like about this new drive is the RGB strip down at the bottom. Hard drives often have indicator lights (this one has one on the top left corner), letting you know when it’s working things out, but that’s not what this is here. It’s a fully addressable strip, giving you a little bit of added pizazz for your storage. You’re able to access the controls two ways, via the Toolkit software from Seagate that comes on the drive, and Razer’s Synapse and Chroma software. Here’s the thing though; I’ve not had any luck so far at making Razer’s software work. It’s a pretty confusing process, and there are so many different parameters I’m having to figure out between the two apps – I’ve somewhat given up. When you have to “enable this” and “turn off that” it gets frustrating. The good news is that the Seagate Toolkit RGB controls work great, and you have a few different options beyond the initial Blue Force color it defaults to.

Pretty is one thing, but functional is another. It’s extremely important to have a dependable drive, along with one that does all of its transfers and loading efficiently, and Seagate continues to deliver here exceptionally well. We used our benchmarking tools ATTO and CrystalMark to give us a little more insight on the matter.

As you’ll see from the pictures above, the drive runs pretty darn well. I took a look at the previous drive we reviewed from Seagate (our review for that Horizon Forbidden West edition one found here), and the numbers are quite similar, meaning if Ron thought it did great there, it’s equally great in Star Wars form. I did have a bit of fluctuation in the read/write speeds once I dumped a decent amount of videos and installed a game on it, but that’s to be expected as they likely exceeded the 128mb cache. Largely, the performance of the drive is wildly consistent.

Speaking of putting stuff on it, that goes like a charm. I put 75 of my Call Of Duty videos on it (thank you Seagate for giving me a place to offload those), which amounted to approximately 66GBs. This only took around 10 minutes, and maybe I’m just ignorant of exact speeds for most drives, but that was relatively fast to me for a spinning platter. As for the game I downloaded (an oldie named Shadow Man), I picked this one mainly because it was only a gigabyte in size. Once downloaded, it did take a second to install, with drive write speeds careening off a cliff towards the end. That being said, it did load the game just fine, with decent speeds for a game that came out back in 1999. I probably wouldn’t recommend using it as a primary gaming drive, but if you’re playing something not too intensive it could do in a pinch.

Lastly, let’s cover the warranty and the included Rescue data recovery. In the US, Seagate covers your drive for a year on manufacturing defects, which is more or less what you’d expect from most electronics. That can grow to up to three years depending on where you’re located, with Europe, Africa, and Russia all under a two year limited warranty and China, Japan, and Australia under three. While the warranty is par for the course, I really like the Rescue data recovery inclusion. This is a service offering to help recover your data if something were to happen, and it’s covered either through your limited warranty or available to purchase after the fact. I’ve not had many issues with external drives, but knowing there’s an option if everything goes kaput is nice to have in your back pocket.

David Burdette

Lead Video Game Editor | [email protected]

David Burdette is a gamer/writer/content creator from TN and Lead Editor for Gaming Trend. He loves Playstation, Star Wars, Marvel, and many other fandoms. He also plays way too much Call Of Duty. You can chat with him on Twitter @SplitEnd89.

90

Excellent