Expert Rating
Advantages
- Sleek with gamer and sci-fi appeal
- Excellent SATA performance
- Free data recovery for three years
The inconvenients
- Very expensive for the capacity
- Average TBW Rating
- Requires a computer that can show it
Our opinion
Billed as a collector’s item, Seagate’s Beskar Ingot SATA SSD is more expensive than the norm. But it’s not all about glitz and candor – it’s also one of the fastest SATA SSDs we’ve tested.
Price when reviewing
$167.99 for 1TB I $283.99 for 2TB
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If you’re a fan of The Mandalorian (of Star Wars franchise fame), the Seagate Beskar Ingot SATA SSD (FireCuda SE) just might tickle your fancy. Assuming, of course, that you can see inside your computer and its 2.5 inch mount points/bays. Otherwise, this player’s styling, however attractive or evocative (it mimics the slabs of Beskar metal used in Mandalorian armor), won’t bring much joy after unboxing.
On the other hand, you’ll continue to enjoy performance – it’s one of the fastest SATA SSDs we’ve tested.
This review is part of our roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.
Seagate Beskar Ingot SSD drive: design and price
The Beskar Ingot SATA is available in 1TB for $168 or 2TB for $284, which we tested. Without being picky, but it’s expensive. Not only for SATA, but for NVMe. Speaking of which, if your system supports it, Seagate is making the Ingot in an NVMe version which we’ll be reviewing soon, although it was only available in a 500GB version at the time of this writing. . And if you’re really into the look, there’s an external USB hard drive you can place prominently on your desk for on-going viewing. (Sorry, there is no external SSD yet).
As for the specifics of the Beskar Ingot reviewed here, it is a standard form factor 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gbps drive. There’s a Seagate-validated Phison S12 controller, 512MB of DRAM main cache, and 64-layer TLC NAND. The reader actually identifies itself in the benchmarks, etc. like a FireCuda SE, which doesn’t seem to be sold in an unthemed version.
Regardless of the components, the drive was among the fastest we’ve tested, and the fastest in some tests.
The Beskar Ingot drive is backed by a five-year warranty with three years of free data recovery. We certainly hope you won’t need the latter, and given how reliable SSDs are these days, we’re pretty sure you won’t. It’s more of a nice feature for high-transaction enterprise drives, but Seagate adds it here, likely to improve sticker shock.
And we wish the TeraBytes Written (aka TBW, or amount of data that can be written to disk) rating was a bit higher: 1,150 TBW is pretty low for a 2TB drive of this price. (It’s 600TBW for the 1TB version.) In case you didn’t know, SSD warranties are similar to those for automobiles: five years or 1,150TBW in this case. Exceeding either limit releases the company from the obligation to replace the drive.
Seagate Beskar Ingot SSD drive: performance
The Beskar Ingot’s performance was one of the best we’ve seen on a SATA TLC drive under Windows 11, roughly matching two very fast drives: Seagate’s 960GB IronWolf Pro and a Samsung 870 EVO. of 4TB. It even maintained its average actual write rate of 435MB/s with our 450GB single file. daily performance on the slower bus is generally very similar.
However, even within the bandwidth limit, Beskar’s ingot performed well. Also note that these are new results for the IronWolf Pro and 870 EVO which may not match their individual reviews.
The Beskar Ingot/FireCuda SE performed very well in our actual 48GB transfers, outpacing the 870 EVO by 12 seconds in total. However, it finished slightly behind the IronWolf Pro, thanks in large part to the latter’s dexterity with the single large 48GB file.
As mentioned earlier, Beskar Ingot held up well during our 450GB single file write, achieving the best time we’ve seen on Windows 11.
As I said above, you will not be disappointed with the performance of the Beskar Ingot. As long as you don’t expect NVMe-like results. That said, subjectively, the difference between SATA and NVMe is much less noticeable in everyday life than that between SATA and hard drives.
Internal drive tests are currently using Windows 11, 64-bit running on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with four 16GB (64GB) Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 graphics card PCIe and an Asmedia ASM3242 3.2×2 USB card. The copy tests use an ImDisk RAM disk using 58 GB of the 64 GB memory.
Each test is performed on a newly formatted drive and TRIM so that the results are optimal. Over time, as a drive fills up, performance decreases due to less NAND for caching and other factors.
The performance figures shown apply only to the drive within the tested capacity. SSD performance may vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips for shotgun reads/writes as well as the amount of NAND available for secondary caching.
Fast but expensive
Beskar’s bars are said to be extremely valuable in the Disney Star Wars universe, so that may be part of the reason for this player’s high price tag. If you consider it a collectible (does anyone really salvage storage?), the cost might not bother you.
However, whether it performs well or not, you can get pretty much the same performance and capacity for a lot less. Your choice.
