Think you're skilled in the ways of the Force? Versed in the Mandalorian Way? (Okay, maybe you just pretend in the mirror.) Either way, you'll want to check out Seagate's $129.99 FireCuda Beskar Ingot External Hard Drive. This 2TB desktop drive is crafted to resemble an ingot of the virtually indestructible metal prized by the Mandalorians and decorated with important elements from the clan's symbology. The Beskar Ingot is a solid performer among external hard drives, though, as you'd expect, its connection to the Disney+ Star Wars spinoff carries a price premium. (And we're a bit puzzled by the lack of USB-C connectivity of any kind.)
A Prime Slice of Mandalorian Bling
While the Seagate FireCuda Beskar Ingot PCIe 4 SSD has a similar Mandalorian-themed design, the Beskar Ingot External Hard Drive takes the concept further. For one thing, it's larger, with more room for decoration; at 0.4 by 2.1 by 4.1 inches (HWD), it's closer to the dimensions of the Beskar ingots depicted in the show, though neither the internal nor external drive attempts to imitate the ingots' metallic sheen.
While the hard drive's top bears the Imperial stamp seen in the show (plus another symbol unidentifiable to me), on the bottom are Mandalorian symbols. The first is the insignia of Clan Mudhorn, the two-person clan comprising the title character plus Grogu (a.k.a. the Child, a.k.a. Baby Yoda), who combine to defeat a mudhorn, an ornery denizen of the planet Arvala-7, in an early episode. Second, as you'd expect if you're even a casual fan of show, is This Is the Way in Mandalorian runes, the oft-recited phrase related to the culture's unity and code of honor.
The drive uses a USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface. In the middle of one end is a USB Type Micro-B port, which connects using a provided cable to a computer's USB Type-A port. At the same end is a status light. We're surprised that this drive from the far future doesn't employ USB-C on either end. There's no bundled second cable or USB Type-A-to-C converter.
At the drive's other end is an RGB lighting strip that glows when the device is plugged in. I've seen the strip pulse blue and orange, and you can customize the lighting using the free Seagate Toolkit software.
Available in a single (2TB) capacity, the Beskar Ingot External Hard Drive lists for $129.99 but is sold by numerous retailers for $99.99, which comes out to 5 cents per gigabyte. This is at the high end of consumer external drives of this capacity, and other vendors offer higher-capacity hard drives for considerably less per gigabyte. For instance, you can find the 5TB WD My Passport at this writing for as low as 2.4 cents per gig. So you're definitely paying some Mandalorian tax here.
The Beskar Ingot lacks the ruggedization features found on some external hard drives such as the SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD and the Silicon Power Armor A66. You'll presumably be using the drive at your or a friend's home rather than traversing the mud flats of Arvala-7 or braving a sandstorm on Tatooine. This shouldn't be an impediment, but you'll want to treat it with care and not drop it, like any platter-based drive.
Seagate backs the Beskar Ingot with a five-year warranty including three years of access to Rescue Data Recovery Services. According to Seagate, the lab claims a 95% success rate for solid-state and hard drive data recovery.
Testing the Beskar Ingot Hard Drive: Speedy Enough, for Spinning Metal
We ran our usual Crystal DiskMark and PCMark 10 Overall storage tests on our Intel X299-based testbed with the Beskar Ingot drive in its default NTFS format, and it did well overall. The drive's sequential read and write speeds, as measured by Crystal DiskMark 6.0, proved typical of a 5,400rpm platter-based drive and fell within the narrow range of values shown by our comparison group. Its read and write speeds were actually a statistically insignificant smidge faster than its peers'. (The one drive in our chart with higher scores, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub, is a 7,200rpm device.)
Its PCMark 10 Overall Score was a little low, but within the normal range of the rather small selection of hard drives on which we've run the current version of that test.
We also reformatted the Beskar Ingot in exFAT and ran two tests from a 2016 MacBook Pro using the laptop's USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. The Mac-only BlackMagic Disk Speed benchmark measures a drive's throughput for reading and writing various video formats. The Mandalorian drive's scores were at the top of a very narrow range among its 5,400rpm competitors.
Finally, in our stopwatch file-transfer test, the drive took 6 seconds to move a 1.2GB folder full of various file types, easily the best among the 5,400rpm drives in our group. (See how we test hard drives.)
Verdict: A Capable Collectible
Fans of the extended Star Wars universe who are also short on bytes will be satisfied with the Seagate FireCuda Beskar Ingot External Hard Drive. This 2TB slab combines Mandalorian symbols with customizable RGB lighting, and as an external drive is far more attractive as a practical collectible than Seagate's matching internal M.2 solid-state drive. Although reasonably speedy for its category, it's still limited to the relatively plodding speeds of a platter-based drive, making it primarily useful for holding a game or multimedia library for occasional access, not for running programs from.
As a specialty collectible, the Beskar Ingot costs more than most 2TB consumer hard drives, but for fans of The Mandalorian, it should be money well spent. Our only regret is that it's not available in larger capacities, both because higher capacities generally offer lower costs per gigabyte, and because you'd be able to fit a more bountiful gaming library onto it, a big consideration with today's AAA games consuming an ever-increasing amount of drive space.