Seagate has yet to reveal its own plans to launch NVMe drives for the new generation, but it will offer consumers a uniquely designed version of its advanced Gen4 FireCuda 530 drives
Beautiful heatsinks for NVMe drives that also help them maintain comfortable operating temperatures are nothing new – but Seagate may very well be the one to do it best, considering its fresh collaboration with renowned Slovenian cooling component manufacturer EK Water Block.
In the absence of new home drives with support for PCI-Express 5.0 communication at this time, Seagate has announced a special collector’s edition of the FireCuda 530 drives, with three variations for its metal heatsink – three different designs leaving the lightsabers of three particularly central characters in the universe The cinematic Star Wars: Luke Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, with a blue tint for the first two and the iconic red tint for the latter.
An illuminated strip in the center of the drive’s cooling is the blade of the lightsaber, while the outer side of the product (the one far from the M.2 connector) is the handle, with a unique design adapted to the source for each version. An impressive investment in the small details that will no doubt be able to excite Star Wars fans who are also looking to upgrade the storage on their PC.
Beyond the design, the new drive that will be offered with a volume of 1TB or 2TB should be the same as the one that was first launched more than a year and a half ago – with an eight-channel Phison E18 controller, DDR4 memory from SK Hynix, Micron’s three-dimensional TLC NAND chip with an internal structure of 176 layers and continuous transfer speeds of up to 7,300MBps in reading and up to 6,900MBps in writing. Branded storage products are nothing new for Seagate, which previously launched a unique FireCuda 520 drive inspired by the game Cyberpunk 2077 and currently offers a host of external storage drives with Marvel characters emblazoned on them, but the Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD certainly seems like a leap A step up in terms of uniqueness (and restarting interest in existing hardware with reduced investment and risk).
We still don’t know how much these unique drives will cost or even when they’ll be available in stores – but there’s reason to hope that it won’t be wildly expensive: as of today, Amazon has the Beskar Ingot Edition of the FireCuda 530, inspired by the popular series. The Mandalorian’, at the same price where you will also find the standard edition of the same drive with a heatsink. $80 before tax for a volume of 500GB and $120 before tax for a volume of 1TB – and while these are quite high prices compared to other advanced Gen4 drives, you can’t make too many complaints about Seagate as it offers one of the highest performance levels in the category on one hand One of the highest writing volumes under warranty in the domestic market (so there is at least a certain segment of consumers for whom the increased price will justify itself).
With the addition of built-in lighting and a careful 3D design, it’s hard to believe that even the Star Wars edition of the FireCuda 530 will cost us “only” $120 for a 1TB volume, but perhaps we can hope for a moderate increase of $10 or $20 to the pricing rather than doubling it or an excessive choice Similar.