Design & Build
The drive is PlayStation-branded, which means you get a 14-day trial of PlayStation Plus in the box and that it comes in the sort of greyish-white colour of the PlayStation 5 console’s default cover (if you’re not familiar with the latest Sony console, it’s not too dissimilar to the colour of Canon’s L-series telephoto lenses) with a PS logo at the top. There’s an Xbox version too, if your gaming sympathies lie with Microsoft. Apart from the external branding and colour, from the outside they all look the same, and this is a standard USB 3.2 SSD, powered by its USB cable, so it will mount and work with just about anything.
The casing is plastic, and larger than both the Kingston XS1000R and Crucial X9. The one sent to us is a 2TB model, but one of 5TB capacity is also available, and represents pretty good value as it’s less than twice the price of the smaller model. When plugged in, a blue LED strip illuminates at the front of the drive (orange in Xbox models) and there’s also an activity LED at the back, near the USB-C port. Neither of them blinks while data is being transferred, simply allowing you to tell if the drive is receiving power or not and, in the case of the blue strip, looking cool.
Features
Apart from the outside of the casing, there’s little to say about the Game Drive itself. It’s an officially licensed product, so has firmware on-board that enables it to work seamlessly with Sony’s PS4 and PS5 consoles, but there’s nothing stopping you from hooking it up to a PC or Mac, and it comes formatted as EXFAT for easy transfer between systems.
The packaging is a nice example of cardboard engineering, keeping the drive solidly contained and unable to flop about inside. Two USB cables are included, both Type-C and Type-A, rather than one and an adapter, and there’s also a warning document telling you to keep the drive at least four inches away from your console.
Performance
While the drive doesn’t perform anything like as quickly as an internal SSD would, it still acquits itself well, and is pretty fast for a USB 3.2 external SSD, though at these speeds we’re hitting the maximum that the USB 3.2 Gen 2 data bus can cope with, so we’re not going to see anything better without moving up to USB 4 or some flavour of Thunderbolt.
| PCMark 10 | Row 0 – Cell 1 |
| Bandwidth | 214MB/s |
| Average access time | 111µs |
| CrystalDiscMark | Row 3 – Cell 1 |
| Read | 1021.48Mb/s |
| Write | 1057.42Mb/s |
Price
At $90/£110 on Seagate’s online store, the Seagate Game Drive undercuts the Kingston XS1000R, WB My Passport Portable SSD and Crucial X9 slightly on price, while hitting data transfer speeds that are broadly similar to the best those drives can offer. If you’re transferring large files to them, you’re not going to notice the difference outside of a second to two’s change in the waiting time, so you may as well buy on price. Seagate is a known and trusted name in the data storage business, which makes this a keenly priced unit.
Who is it for?
It may be aimed squarely at gamers with its branding and design, but this useful portable SSD will be useful to just about anyone who wants something to store data on that’s faster than the average USB flash drive. The 5TB model in particular is larger than most other portable SSD offerings, which tend to top out at 2TB or 4TB (Sandisk’s Desk Drive will hit 8TB, but requires a power connector) and is a lot of storage to put in your pocket.
Buy it if…
- You need fast portable storage
- You don’t mind (or indeed welcome) the PlayStation branding
- USB 3.2 speeds are enough
Don’t buy it if…
- You’re more of an Xbox fan
- You need more than 5TB
- You’d rather have a NAS
