Lightsaber Collection (ANH) FireCuda PCIe M.2 1TB Internal Drive - Seagate - Hard Drives

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Prepare For Battle!

  

Official Description

Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD:

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 7300MB/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.

• Dimensions: 6.181in/157.0mm × 6.102in/155.0mm × 6.181in/157.0mm
• Weight: 190g/0.419lb
• Storage Capacity: 1TB/2TB

   

Lightsaber Collection FireCuda PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD (1TB)

Update June 2023: this review was expanded with a technical discussion. The update follows after Chuck's unboxing and installation intructions!

Decorating your PC's internal components just took another step forward with the release of Seagate's Solid State Drive Lightsaber Collection! Featuring a brilliant design complete with interchangeable faceplates and light-up LED function, this will surely complement any other internal LED's you have in your case.

Featuring up to 2TB of space (our version is the 1 TB version) and a swappable heatsink faceplate design, your M.2 drive will now (literally) shine as another design component in your PC. M.2 drives typically sit in your case in a relatively boring way, but now you can make them yet another custom design element to enjoy.

In order to take advantage of the M.2 design, you will need to make sure your motherboard supports the installation of M.2 drives. And, if you already have an M.2 drive installed (and are using it), it's going to take some computer savvy to move your Windows installation from one drive to another.

My setup features two M.2 drives, so I was able to replace my second drive (non-OS drive) with the new Lightsaber M.2 drive with a fair amount of ease. Thanks to the free AOMEI Backupper software I was able to easily clone my older drive, swap the drives, and then restore my image to the new Lightsaber drive. Unfortunately, if your M.2 drive is your system drive you will need the pro version of that software to clone and restore your system to the new drive (or some other cloning software). Seagate does also offer some software to help with these tasks.

This drive also comes equipped with a swappable lightsaber heatsink which will help keep this drive running at optimal performance. Also included is a cable that connects your drive to an Addressable RGB (ARGB) header on your motherboard, assuming your motherboard has this type of port (more on that later).

Unboxing

As with most Seagate drive packaging you are going to get a pretty standard box. Unless you just like to keep everything, you will probably toss it eventually. Included in the box are 3 swappable heatsink covers, the drive itself, an ARGB cable, some decals, a Star Wars-themed spec sheet, and some white papers that you can read when you are having trouble falling asleep.

It's worth noting, the outside of the box says Star Wars: A New Hope, so it's possible they have other releases planned featuring lightsabers from some of the other movies.

    

Everything is wrapped up nicely in a foam insert for protection. Once you take the drive out you can swap out the faceplate for the lightsaber of your choice easily by sliding the plate off along the metal tracks. It will click nicely into place to keep it from moving around when you are handling the drive. Each plate even has a nice Star Wars quote on the inside for an added bit of detail.

    

 
 
 

Installation

Basic installation of an M.2 drive requires some basic computer hardware skills since you will be opening your case and handling the internal components. Make sure you power down before swapping out internal components! Depending on how many M.2 slots you have you will need to decide where to install your drive. For my setup I have 2 slots. My first slot has my OS installed on it, so I chose you use my second slot that I reserve for programs. It's much easier to clone that drive over than it is a system drive. As mentioned before, I use the free AOMEI Backupper software to complete this task. Be patient, as this can take a while.

If you plan on taking advantage of the LED light-up function, you are going to want to plug the cable into your drive BEFORE installing it. It's just easier than trying to find the port after it is installed since the port is on the side opposite the M.2 slot connectors and recessed slightly, making it hard to plug in when the drive is already installed.

Your next problem will likely be where you are going to plug this in. IF your motherboard has an available ARGB header, then you simply plug it into that and you are finished. An onboard ARGB port will allow you to control the LED lighting from your software. HOWEVER, if you don't have an ARGB port (mine did NOT) you will need to get a little more hardware if you want to enjoy LED glory.

Keep in mind, a standard RGB header is NOT the same thing as an Addressable RGB header. If you need detailed information on how to tell the two apart, I recommend checking out this article for some nice reference images.

  

If you don't have an ARGB header, NOT TO WORRY. There are solutions out there to add these headers to your system. I opted for a simple SATA power cable plug with an analog switch. It was an easy, inexpensive solution. While I won't be able to change my LED colors via software, I can still enjoy them by using the controller attached to the power cable.

After waiting an hour for my image to make its way to the new drive, one more reboot to re-establish the drive's files, my system was up and running with the new drive! I tried various colors with the swappable lightsaber plates, and they made a great addition to the Star Wars NVIDIA TITAN Xp video card!

    
 

If your love of Star Wars bleeds into your love of custom computer builds, and you want your computer to reflect that, this is a great way to add yet another Star Wars element to your build! While I haven't yet migrated my system drive, I plan on migrating it soon to the Beskar™ Ingot Special Edition FireCuda® NVMe SSD that I replaced with this Lightsaber edition drive to complete the internal Star Wars components!

Installation Caveats

What I would like to add concerning the installation process is that the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD has a substantial height. Which means depending on where the M.2 slots on your mainboard are located you may run into some trouble. The M.2 slots are often near the graphics card PCI slot or some other PCI slot and if a hefty card is installed in one of the slots you may not have enough headroom to install the SSD. So be sure you have either a second M.2 slot or that your graphics card doesn't only allow the installation of standard M.2 SSDs without massive heatsinks and added LED part. But most mainboards for the enthusiast offer two M.2 slots.

Technical Discussion

I would now like to talk about the technical side of things: if you are interested in the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD chances are you are an enthusiast and know your way around a PC. But in case you are not the first basic question is: why bother with M.2 and PCI express aka PCIe SSD drives, why not just use a standard SSD you plug in like any other hard drive, i.e. via cable that connects to one of the SATA ports on your mainboard? The simple answer is: speed. If you use a PCIe SSD in your M.2 slot on your mainboard you will have much higher speeds than with a traditional SATA SSD. The Seagate PCIe 4 NVMe SSD can have read speeds of up to 7,300 MB/s, a current SATA III SSD maybe up to 500-600 MB/s. And if you wonder what "NVMe" is and why it matters: it is a communication protocol for PCIe SSDs and NVMe allows PCIe SSDs to take full advantage of the parallelism you get with modern SSDs, which allows for the much higher read/write speeds. Furthermore PCIe NVMe SSDs have the advantage of directly communicating with the CPU, which is something standard SATA SSDs can't do, resulting not just in higher speeds, but also much lower latency (think of it as faster access times) than your traditional SATA SSD. In laymen's terms: a PCIe NVMe SSD is an SSD with turbo boost.

Now the big question is if you actually need a PCIe NVMe SSD. Well, as always it depends. As of now this is almost exclusively something for enthusiasts. And NVMe SSDs are more expensive than standard SATA SSDs. So you are either someone who needs super fast read/write speeds because you work with huge files every day, or maybe you are a dedicated hardcore gamer and you want to be sure that the storage will never be a bottleneck. Or, in the case of the Lightsaber Collection SSD, you build your own PCs and aesthetics matter to you. An M.2 SSD is a clean option, there are no data and power cables, as the drive is inserted into the M.2. slot directly on your motherboard. So if you want a very clean looking system an M.2 SSD is your top pick. You don't need to worry about cable management here. And of course the ARGB Lightsaber Collection SSD will look rather pretty as you can see in Chuck's photos .

Now your games, if you you want to use the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD for games, won't miraculously run substantially better than before, unless you used a mechanical hard drive until now. Then you will notice a marked improvement when it comes to loading times. But don't expect any substantial improvements if you used a standard SATA SSD before. Textures etc are loaded from the drive into the VRAM of your graphics card and then many things depend on how well a game has been optimized. In a game like Hogwarts Legacy some doors are hidden loading screens, i.e. they may open only after a delay, because the game needs to load the new textures and other things required by the new area you are about to enter. You will feel a difference if you installed the game on a mechanical drive and then use an SSD, but you won't feel as much of a difference when you use a PCIe NVMe SSD instead of a SATA SSD. However, with a PCIe NVMe SSD you can always be sure that if certain things in a game are lagging, or doors only open after a short wait, then not because your storage is creating a bottleneck. But texture pop up and other performance issues are almost always the result of a badly optimized game and cannot really be remedied with super fast SSDs. And of course your graphics card has the biggest impact here, especially what kind of and how much VRAM it has. Again, provided you do not use a mechanical hard drive, they can negatively impact performance of modern games, i.e. texture streaming and how fast new regions are loaded or loading times in general. Using an NVMe SSD it's guaranteed that your graphics card will get the data it needs as fast as possible but a standard SATA SSD will do just fine as well.

And it's the same with using the drive as a system drive. While you will feel a substantial improvement if you switch from using a mechanical drive to an SSD, the transition from standard SATA SSD to a PCIe NVMe SSD won't be that much quicker in most cases. Applications will of course load as fast as possible, but they already start almost instantly (depending on the application of course) using a traditional SATA SSD.

Things change however if you work with large files and your application needs to write or read a lot of data. The much higher read/write speed of the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD will speed up things considerably. Again, this may not be as noticeable if you only use Photoshop and edit photos, but once you edit video you will definitely benefit from the super fast read/write speeds that are more than 12 times higher than your SATA III (current specification) SSD.

If you work with video and want to use the Seagate Lighsaber Collection SSD I would recommend you get the 2 TB option, not only does it have twice the storage capacity, but it also has higher write speed, 6,900 MB/s vs 6,000 MB/s.

Since PC technology is constantly evolving the Seagate PCIe 4 NVMe Firecuda Lightsaber Collection SSD is no longer the latest tech. You can get PCIe 5 drives now, however your mainboard needs to support it and since PCIe 5 is still very new (first drives have become available only weeks ago) the read/write speeds can be lower than the theoretical maximum, depending on your mainboard too of course. Chances are most people don't have a PC that is ready for PCIe 5, so don't worry too much about potentially missing out on something by buying what is now no longer the current and latest PCIe specification. And PCIe 4 is already plenty fast. The next evolution will be PCIe gen 6, but this is still some ways off, with PCIe 5 drives only coming to market now.

Another thing to consider is of course lifespan. Seagate says the 1 TB model is good for 1,275 TB written, i.e. you could, in theory, completely wipe the entire SSD and rewrite it to capacity more than 1,000 times before the SSD is expected to fail. The larger 2 TB version is even good for 2,550 TB. In short: do not worry about ruining your drive by writing data to it. Chances are something else will break before your SSD breaks because you wrote too much data onto it. If you erase/fill your SSD to capacity once every week (no one does that) it would still last more than 24 years, in theory, but again, chances are something else will break first. Seagate says MTBF (mean time between failure) is 1,800,000 hours. Or 75,000 days if you run your PC 24/7. So, nothing to worry here. However, the SSD can feel the ill effect of heat and this could affect its durability. Which is why the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD comes with a hefty heatsink to begin with. I left my case open and touched the SSD after it had been in use for an hour or so and yes, the SSD gets hot, not scorching hot, but hot, however you can still touch it. And here is the thing: excessive heat can and will damage the SSD and also heavily impact read/write speeds, the SSD should automatically throttle if it detects something is amiss, but with the Seagate SSD you will hopefully never experience this, since the heatsink is very massive and therefore it should keep the SSD cool enough.

To test how stable transfer rates are I used HD Tune Pro (a benchmark tool) and transfer rates remained stable throughout the test, which means there was no thermal throttling or any other performance issues even after stressing the SSD for some time. The heatsink does its job!

That being said the inside of a PC case can get very hot, so depending on where the SSD is installed you may want to make sure you have good ventilation, especially if the SSD is anywhere near your graphics card, especially top of the line models and here of course the current generation can get quite hot. So proper ventilation is one way to make sure heat will never be a problem for your SSD.

A quick word about power consumption: according to the spec sheet the 1 TB model requires a little more than 6 watts. Not a whole lot, but please note that idle power consumption with these kind of SSDs is much higher than for traditional SATA SSDs, again, 6 watts is not all that much, but be aware that PCIe NVMe SSDs comsume more power when idle.

A synthetic benchmark, I used Crystal Disk, returned 7,348 MB/s read speed and 6,015 MB/s write speed, which is even a bit better than the theoretical maximum, but these benchmarks are just that, synthetic benchmarks. I was provided with the 1 TB version of the drive by Seagate, the 2 TB version would have higher write speeds of up to 6,900 MB/s instead of 6,000 MB/s for the 1 TB version. This is pretty normal for any SSD, larger capacity drives have better write speeds.

Not to rely just on benchmarks I also copied a 10 GB folder of some smaller and several larger files to the drive using the Windows file explorer and did not experience any slowdown at all, transfer rates were more or less stable, depending on file size, i.e. if you copy lots of small files the write speeds can be slower than for copying or writing large files, but that is normal behavior and without going into detail one reason for that is also the way the file system works, anyway there was no throttling during the transfer. Of course the copy/write speed depends on what source you are using, if your SATA III SSD has a read speed of 550 MB/s or so your lightning fast Firecuda Lightsaber Collection Seagate PCIe 4 NVMe SSD won't speed up that transfer. So the full read/write speeds come into play when you either install games on the drive or, as mentioned before, use it with applications that need to read and write large files or if you happen to have two PCIe NVMe SSDs installed in your system and copy files between them.

To conclude my part of the review: should you buy the Seagate Firecuda PCIe 4 NVMe Lightsaber Collection SSD? Yes, absolutely, if... you value aesthetics and want a minimalist system with as few cables as possible. The Star Wars design and ARGB functionality will further improve the aesthetics of your PC, you can also greatly benefit from it if you work with large files (video comes to mind), games will benefit to a degree, but not as much really, since so many other factors much more impact gaming performance (unless you still use a mechanical hard drive, then you will notice marked improvements for loading times etc), but with the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD you at least know that your storage is not creating a bottleneck.
If you do no have a PC with a glass side panel (i.e. you cannot see the insides of your PC), if you do not work with large files or if you do not play all that many modern games then the Lightsaber Collection SSD will probably be nothing you would ever benefit from, a standard SSD would work just fine for you. Or if you still feel you would greatly benefit from the very high read/write speed but don't have a PC case with glass side panel then any of the traditional PCIe NVMe SSDs without the ARGB functionality would do. Seagate does of course offer a regular Firecuda 530 SSD as well, without the Star Wars design and LED resulting in a smaller form factor. But your typical office or internet PC does not require a PCIe NVMe SSD, it would be overkill, Word won't load much faster and typical Word documents won't load much faster either. But if you work with video, large files or game a lot and you also want your PC to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, you can do no wrong here and the extra money you need to spend on the Seagate Firecuda Lightsaber Collection SSD is well invested if the Star Wars lightsaber design is something you want to have. You do get your money's worth if you are an enthusiast. 

However, if optics mean nothing to you but you want the extra performance then the regular Seagate Firecuda 530 SSD - which is basically the same SSD, just without all the added Star Wars bits and no ARGB functionality of course - is your option (it is also much cheaper). One advantage of the regular version of the Firecuda 530 SSD is that it can also be used with a Playstation 5, if that is something which interests you and you want to expand the PS5's storage. So my advice: if you want a Star Wars themed PC then the Seagate Lightsaber Collection SSD is highly recommended. Everyone else can save some money by buying the regular Seagate Firecuda 530 version of the drive which offers identical performance. Only you can decide if the LED and three Star Wars lightsaber faceplates are worth the extra money to you.

For more information on this drive you can check out the full press release.

Click here to visit the product pages for the Seagate Special Edition Star Wars Drives 

Thanks to Seagate for sending us this drive to review

External Links:

• Seagate Special Edition Hard Drives
• Lightsaber Collection FireCuda PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD