Seagate Lightsaber Collection Special Edition 2TB M.2 SSD Review

We love our fast storage here at eTeknix, with the promise of shorter loading times and faster system performance, upgrading your storage can really make a big difference to the PC user experience. With the latest PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 drives from Seagate, you can get some of the fastest read/write speeds on the market right now, so how could they possibly make things even better? By adding an illuminated lightsaber design to the heatsink, of course! The Force is certainly strong with this design. Seagate Lightsaber Collection It doesn't matter if you live on the dark side or not, as this SSD comes with three faceplates, allowing you quickly change it out for the lightsaber of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker to suit your personal taste or the aesthetic of your current PC build. The heatsink isn't just for aesthetics, of course, it'll cool the drive and ensure it can maintain the impressive drive performance, which can deliver read speeds of up to 7300 MB/s. This drive is available in either 1TB or 2TB variants and is just the latest in a long line of special edition drives from Seagate that span Star Wars, Marvel, and gaming franchises. You can check for up-to-date stock and prices here, as this one tends to sell out quickly when stock lands. Features FEEL THE FORCE Features three iconic lightsabers — Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker.INTERCHANGEABLE DESIGN A one-of-a-kind design lets you swap out which faceplate fits your collection at any moment.A POWERFUL GLOW Customisable RGB LED lighting brings a galaxy of atmosphere to your drive.FULFIL YOUR DESTINY Accumulate an array of media, files, and games with up to 2 TB of formidable capacity.WARRANTY Enjoy peace of mind with our industry-leading 5-year warranty and 3-year Rescue Data Recovery Services. What Seagate Had to Say "This special edition NVMe PCIe Gen4 SSD features three iconic lightsaber designs inspired by Star Wars: New Hope™ — Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. A one-of-kind design lets you swap out which faceplate fits your collection at any moment. Prepare for battle with the officially licensed Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. A low-profile heatsink helps dissipate heat and reduce thermal throttling, while you harness up to 7,300 MB/s of speed that this SSD has pulsing inside. Swap between three iconic lightsaber faceplates — Obi-Wan Kenobi™, Darth Vader™, and Luke Skywalker™ — thanks to a one-of-kind interchangeable design." Packaging The box is nice and small, but hey, it's only an M.2-sized drive, so hardly surprising. It's a durable black box, with a clear photo of the drive, as well as all three face plates on the front. Around the box, we can see the capacity (2TB), RGB support, and read/write speeds of 7300/7300Mbps. The box slides open, where you'll find a little flyer for the marketing, as well as a lovely cut foam insert protecting the drive and the two alternative face places. The Luke Skywalker one is pre-installed, but I love having somewhere safe to store the rest of them. Deeper in the box, there's an external RGB sync cable, as well as all the usual documents, and some stickers. A Closer Look The heatsink faceplates are all black coated aluminium, and nice and thick too, to aid with cooling performance and durability. The actual lightsaber part is actually a cut-out on the face plate. Also, looking at the back of the plate, there's a small EK logo, who I'm guessing designed the actual hardware of the cooler. Looking back there's a tiny EK logo on the box too, albeit, no wording mentions their brand, which is a shame. They all look great, and while the cut-out is meant for the RGB strip on the other part, the handle designs and logos look stunning, especially the little bit of chrome such as that found on the Darth Vader saber. As you can see, there's a milky white block inside the heatsink, this is what's going to glow with the built-in RGB light, and should give it a great diffused and glowing look. On the other end, there's a two-pin header, which can be used with the RGB sync cable. Around the back, the SSD sticker is placed on the heatsink, rather than on the PCB of the drive. It seems to be glued in there or at least, it's snug enough that I didn't feel comfortable trying to remove it, so I'll leave it be. However, it appears to be the flagship FireCuda drive we know and love, the same you often find in PC or PS5 bundles from them. The FireCuda 530 with a new sticker on it, effectively, so the Penta-Core powered Phison PS5018-E18 12nm controller and a pair of SK Hynix 8GB 1600 MHZ DDR4 chips with 3D TLC NAND to get The actual heatsink is robust, covering the rear of the NVMe drive, and using four screws, and clamps to the drive, and has a lot of forward mass to provide plenty of heat dissipation. There's a thick layer of thermal material too. Overall, it's everything you could expect from a premium M.2 drive. Want to swap a faceplate? No tools are required, just slide it off to one side. There's a spring-loaded ball which clicks into place, holding the plate from sliding around once installed. RGB Performance The RGB is a big focus here and if you max out the brightness, BOY IS IT BRIGHT! I mean, this may be small, but it puts out a significant amount of light and vibrant colours. Plus, it's fully addressable RGB, so you can have transitions, effects, fades, and adjustable brightness too. It's hard to get a picture of at full brightness, it's so shocking, but honestly, it's pretty epic too. With the heatsink top removed, you can see the entire block is glowing. Plus, why limit yourself to a single colour, when you can go full Rainbow Saber, who wouldn't want that? Now let's do it in Gif form. However, our site has been problematic with this image, so it may or may not work... here goes! Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn't used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn't something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive's performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We're using Anvil's Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Application and Gaming Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 10's storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor in NAND-based drives as the chips can only be rewritten so often before they'll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. Where appropriate, we will test this using Anvil's Storage Utilities. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. Hardware ASRock X570MAMD Ryzen 3700XNVidia RTX 2080 Crucial Sport 4 x 8GB 3200MHz DDR4Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-U12S Software Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkPCMark 10 Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 64 bit Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren't using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive's sequential and random performance. All results are MB/s, and higher is better. How Much Does it Cost? This drive is pretty fantastic, and while it's unlikely that a Star Wars-themed drive will appeal to everyone, for fans of the series looking to customise their latest PC build? I'm sure they'll love it! Sure, you are going to pay a premium over the stock model, twice actually. This is the flagship FireCuda drive, which is excellent, plus a thick and premium quality EK heatsink on top, plus the StarWars theme and licence on top of that. If that sounds like something you're happy with, you can check for the latest stock and prices right here on Amazon. Overview There's no doubt about the performance of this drive, it's their high-end PCIe Gen 4.0 drive that's been on the market for roughly 2 years now with only minor adjustments to any components or manufacturing offering any variance in its performance. In a perfect scenario, it can hit up to 7300 MB/s read and write speeds, but the files you're dealing with, your CPU, motherboard, and all that jazz, can throw that out to some degree. I managed to get just above 7100 MB/s, and honestly, that's pretty fantastic really; loading times go brrrr. Let's get down to what really matters, the heatsink, that's what you're really buying into here. It's pretty stunning and actually, about one of the best engineers I've seen in a long time. It's got a good mass to it, thick aluminium, a two-part main body that slides together and locks in place with four screws, and there's a thick thermal pad to ensure even heat dissipation. In short, thermal performance is not an issue for most use cases such as gaming. Then we have the style, which is just stunning. You don't have to be a Star Wars fan to appreciate that this is a cool idea, but you do likely have to be a pretty hard-core Star Wars fan to invest in this version of the hard drive. Star Wars is nothing new to Seagate, they've done a load of licenced hardware over the years, but this may be their coolest integration of the licence to date. Should I Buy One? I think this is an extremely specialist product, it delivers class-leading read and write performance, fantastic cooling, and a unique aesthetic for Star Wars fans, and if you need a fast, cool and Star Wars-themed hard drive, well, this is the best of the best!