Seagate Grogu Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drive

Even if you're not a fan of the Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian, you doubtless know Grogu, though you may not know him by name: He's the creature commonly known as Baby Yoda, and he now lends his name to countless product tie-ins, including Seagate's Grogu Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drive ($139.99 for 2TB). As far as we can tell, this is the same product as the FireCuda Beskar Ingot External Hard Drive, but with a different skin. And while the Beskar drive is strictly for Mandalorian fans, the cute image of Grogu should give this external drive wider appeal. You pay extra for the branding, there's no USB-C connection, and the warranty is for a mere one year, but it's a solid performer. For those who love Baby Yoda, it should be worth the price.

It's Quite Easy Being Green

The Grogu drive measures 0.4 by 2.1 by 4.1 inches (HWD), close to any number of external hard drives. Its top and sides are a light green; the top features an illustration of Grogu (except for the tips of his ears, which are too wide to fit in the frame). Baby Y and the background are mostly various shades of green as well. On the underside of the drive, along with certification info and a trademark nod to Lucasfilm Ltd., is a green silhouette of Grogu's head showing the full spread of his ears.

The drive uses a USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface. Centered at one end is a USB Micro-B port, which connects using a supplied cable to your computer's USB Type-A port. There's a status light at the same end. The lack of USB-C support is a notable omission; there's no second cable or USB-A-to-C adapter in the box.

At the other end of the device is an RGB lighting strip that glows when the drive is plugged in. By default it pulses red, but you can change colors using the free Seagate Toolkit software.

The Grogu drive has no ruggedness cred to speak of, and as a spinning-platter hard drive it's more vulnerable to damage if dropped than a solid-state drive (SSD) would be. Still, I couldn't resist performing an extra test to see if I could get the drive to respond to the energy field said to bind the galaxy together. But though I repeatedly brought my full focus and concentration to bear on it, I couldn't get the Grogu drive to levitate as much as a millimeter. Possibly this had more to do with my ineptitude in the ways of the Force than with any deficiency in the drive itself.

Testing the Grogu Hard Drive: Typical of its Platter Kind

We ran our usual Crystal DiskMark and PCMark 10 Overall storage tests on our Intel X299-based testbed with the Seagate drive in its default NTFS format, and it did well overall. The 2TB drive's sequential read and write speeds, as measured by Crystal DiskMark 6.0, proved typical of a portable hard drive, falling within the narrow range of values shown by our comparison group. Its PCMark 10 Overall Score was also within the normal range of the rather small selection of hard drives on which we've run the current version of that test.

We then reformatted the Grogu drive in exFAT and ran two tests from a 2016 MacBook Pro using the laptop's Thunderbolt 3 ports. The Mac-only BlackMagic Disk Speed benchmark measures a drive's throughput for reading and writing various video formats. The Grogu drive's results were near the top of the close cluster of scores for that test, while its folder copy results were typical of the recent hard drives we have tested.

A Premium for Cuteness

The Grogu Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drive is one of a growing number of Seagate hard drives and SSDs with movie tie-ins. Along with the Grogu and Beskar Ingot gear, the company also offers Boba Fett drives and has teamed with Marvel to produce three Spider-Man drives, one of which will soon be caught in our test web. Both the Grogu and Beskar hard drives are solid Seagate kit, with typically solid performance but an outdated USB-A interface. They cost considerably more per gigabyte than generic external drives, are warrantied for only a single year (although they do also include a three-year subscription to a data protection recovery service), and the ones we've seen so far only come in the same 2TB capacity.

To get more bang for your buck, you'd be better off with the Editors' Choice award-winning 5TB WD My Passport, which sells for as little as 2.4 cents per gigabyte and includes a five-year warranty. Of course, the real appeal of these products is the character branding; many Star Wars fans would gladly pay a bit extra to have Grogu's likeness gracing their drive—or to receive one as a gift. For the rest of us, cheaper options there are, though less charisma have they.

[Editor's Note: This review was revised on Nov. 15, 2022, with updated information around the warranty length and data recovery service subscription.]