Seagate has been on a collaboration spree of late with the latest one being with Marvel leading to FireCuda hard drives with a fancy skin such as this one, the Seagate Black Panther Special Edition External hard disk drive. These drives are basically the same as other Seagate FireCuda drives, just that they now have a good looking skin and a few additional Seagate and Marvel stickers. The Marvel series includes several themed drives based on characters from the movie franchise such as Black Panther, Okoye, Shuri and King of Wakanda.
Packaging
The package is fairly simple with a pre-formed plastic window letting you clearly see the Black Panther decal on the hard drive. On the inside, you get to see the hard drive, a short USB 3.0 Type-A to Type-B cable, Marvel and Seagate stickers and lastly, a couple of pamphlets for warranty and necessary information.
The Drive
The hard drive construction itself has no additional embellishments that set it apart from other Seagate drives. It’s a simple two part plastic casing with a 2.5-inch hard drive on the inside. The bottom part comes in a nice purple colour while the top side has the Black Panther decal.
The FireCuda emblem is embossed into the top-left corner of the front face and the Seagate wordmark gets a similar treatment in the bottom-right of the drive.
One the side farthest from the port is an LED strip that runs across the entire body. While it is customisable, the default flowing RGB pattern is pretty good on its own. If you’ve handled any of the previously released Special Edition external hard drives, then you’ll know exactly how this one looks and feels.
Performance
Inside the Seagate Black Panther Special Edition drive is a 2.5-inch Seagate ST2000LM007 base model hard drive. It has 128 MB of cache and is a 5400 RPM drive. The rated transfer speed is 140 MB/s for both read and write operations. Also, the average power consumed during write operations, which is the more intensive of the two, is 1.8 Watts. And idle power consumption is 0.5 Watts.
We found the hard drive to average at 128.3 MB/s for write operations and 131.6 MB/s for read operations. While this is a far-cry from SSDs, it’s still good enough for storing files that you’d need to move around on a day-to-day basis.
Who’s this for?
Like we mentioned, this is a pretty decent drive for your day-to-day storage needs. For the price of INR 6,999 this 2TB drive would end up costing you INR 3.5 per GB of storage space. Considering that an external SSD such as the Crucial X6 can give you much faster storage at INR 6.5 per GB, the Black Panther SE external hard drive still has its place in the storage market and makes for a good buy. Also, the added coolness factor should certainly work in your favour.
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Mithun Mohandas
Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile
