SureFire 1TB SSD & 2TB HDD External Drive Review

SureFire Gaming HDD

While the HDD may not have the same speed as the SSD, it does mean you can have larger capacities at a more affordable price. If all you’re doing is backing up your files, storing game installations, and things like that, then speed isn’t really needed. For AAA gaming installations, you may want the SSD, especially if playing directly from the drive. However, many console games, such as those on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 natively ran from a 2.5″ HDD, so you’ll notice similar performance using the external SureFire HDD vs internal storage.

The SureFire Gaming Hard Drive has a USB 3.2 GEN 1 interface for transfer speeds of up to 5 Gbps, so you’ll have no issues getting the full performance of the built-in drive. The hard drive comes with a USB-C adapter and a USB-A cable, ensuring it’s easily connected to a wide range of devices. Furthermore, much like I covered on the SSD, this drive also comes with Nero Backup software for added security.

Features

• Suitable for both console and PC gaming
• Conveniently store all your games in one place
• Multi-colour changing LED accent lights
• High-speed data transfer
• SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps
• Nero Backup Software (Windows only)
• Can also be used as a regular external HDD for file storage

Performance

Obviously, the HDD doesn’t have the same speed as the SSD, but it does offer a larger capacity at a lower price, which is certainly appealing. Much like the SSD, the drive exceeded its official rating of 140MB/s read and 140MB/s write, so perfect is pretty fantastic for a drive of this class!

Read and write times were tested on both Windows 10 writing to and from a 500GB SATA III SSD and Xbox Series X using the built-in high-speed storage.

While the SSD took just 32.5 and 22.7 seconds to read and write 10GB of data to the drive, the HDD took 1:13 and 1:12, or roughly 2.5x longer. That’s still not bad though, and it certainly didn’t feel like it was holding me up.

Of course, moving up to 50GB and 100GB files did feel a lot longer. Clocking in at 6:23 to write 50GB of data to the drive and 12:15 to write 100GB. The read times were just a few seconds quicker while moving the data back. While that may not seem fast, it’s certainly a lot faster than downloading that amount of data again. Even on my 350Mbps+ internet, in ideal circumstances, that’s an hour or more of downloading.

Much like the SSD, this drive runs on USB 3.1 and uses a SATA III HDD, and it’ll outpace the read/writes of the older SATA II drives in the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. Loading older titles from the drive worked great, but of course, current-gen games will really drag for the PS5, and Xbox Series X won’t allow you to use this drive for loading Series X/S Enhanced titles, they will need to be restored to the main drive first.