2023 Christmas Gadget Buying Guide

Seagate

When it comes to storage, Seagate is one of the biggest and the best in the business. I’m a big fan of their external drives though, as while storage can often be a little bit boring to think about, it’s a major and essential part of our digital lives. Seagate continues to release some amazing collaborations with brands like Star Wars, Marvel and Bethesda, to name but a few.

Features

• OFFICIALLY LICENSED Take your library of games anywhere with this special edition game drive, officially licensed by the award-winning creators at Bethesda.
• LIGHT UP THE SKY Engulf your game in atmosphere with customisable RGB LED lighting and a design that feels certified for a Constellation explorer.
• HIGH CAPACITY Up to 5 TB of space lets you backup all your content without sacrificing files.
• XBOX COMPATIBLE Works with Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One X, Xbox One S and PC.
• WARRANTY Enjoy peace of mind with the included 3-year Rescue Data Recovery Services1 and 1-year Special warranty.

While this is technically a humble external HDD, its unique design makes it so much more fun. If you’re going to have this out on display on your desktop or with your laptop all the time, why have something that looks boring?

Plus, with these unique designs, such as their latest Starfield edition, I think it makes them very giftable, and perfect for your tech-loving friends and family over Christmas, or in my case, getting one for yourself.

Available in either 2TB or 5TB variants, this drive is perfect for backing up some videos, your photos, music, movies and games, with the 2TB starting around £90 and the 5TB up to £150, but it’s often on sale for around £125.

Available on Amazon.

What if you need big storage, but you also need extreme speeds? For NVMe Gen 5 storage, the FireCuda is the gold standard, bringing big performance, with relatively accessible prices. There are “faster” drives on the market, but they cost much more for comparatively small gains and larger costs due to their bundled cooling hardware.

Features

• FULL TILT SPEEDS Up to 10,000 MB/s means the full power of PCIe Gen5 speeds are yours to wield
• FASTER FASTER FASTER Transfer speeds up to 50% faster than PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs and up to 17× faster than SATA SSDs
• BUILT TO LAST Up to 2,000 TB TBW means you can rewrite up to 1 TB of data every day, for five years (based on 2 TB capacity)
• READY TO ROLL Plug-and-play compatibility with most PCIe Gen5 motherboards and backwards compatibility with PCIe Gen4
• WARRANTY Enjoy long-term peace of mind with three years of rescue data recovery services and a five-year limited warranty

While the FireCuda doesn’t have a heatsink in the box, most of you don’t even need one, as many decent motherboards feature a good-quality heatsink on the primary M.2 slot anyway.

Capable of hitting around 10,000 MB/s read and write, this drive is certainly no slouch, and a truly next-gen upgrade for any PC usage. Faster boot times, more responsive applications, swift file transfers, and best of all, it can speed up gaming load times and performance thanks to the low latency response times and massive read/write speeds.

Available on Amazon.