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  • shabby - Friday, August 27, 2021 - link

    External gaming ssd? Lol ok there marketing department 🙄
  • vlad42 - Friday, August 27, 2021 - link

    Well isn't it obvious? Everyone knows you frag harder and faster with the l33t g4m3r RGB LEDs!
  • ceomrman - Monday, August 30, 2021 - link

    Yellow is obviously the fastest color in general, but the ability to tweak the shades really comes in handy for specific tasks. Try Crysis with green lighting on your SSD - you'll be impressed by the mellow, smooth rendering that results. The Civilization series isn't a max FPS beast, so the more AI-friendly glow of blue lighting is optimal for strategy players. Take care, though - if you set the blue lights to blink randomly, you may find the increased sneakiness and aggression of the computer opponents difficult to overcome. And of course you can't beat the zing of a nice orange-red glow while you work on a Power Point presentation for the boss.
  • Spunjji - Friday, September 3, 2021 - link

    I'm getting Hi-Fi cable review vibes from this.
  • Operandi - Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - link

    It actually looks fine but why does everyone feel the need to tack "gaming" onto everything. Its cheesy AF and makes everything look like cheap marketing grab even if the product is good. Are all gamers really that simple minded?

    It would be like if Porsche wasn't able to sell any Caymans or 911s because it wasn't called the "Fast driving 911" or "Cayman Goes Fast" cause nobody would know that they were fast cars otherwise.
  • Dantte - Thursday, September 9, 2021 - link

    But can it run Crysis?
  • thestryker - Friday, August 27, 2021 - link

    Thanks for including the DIY with the P31 in there with the other two. It's interesting to see the performance characteristics and the fact that it doesn't have as high peak power draw, costs less and works just as well.
  • MDD1963 - Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - link

    Yes, that extra 2 Watts on average consumed over the 30 minute period after a CrystalDiskMark workout could add up when electric bill day arrives! :)
  • Spunjji - Friday, September 3, 2021 - link

    2 watts less heat being dissipated through a passive enclosure seems a lot more relevant than electricity bills in this context.
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, August 27, 2021 - link

    Ok, now bring on the USB 4.0 external NVMe enclosures!
  • Flying Aardvark - Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - link

    I'm waiting for the same. Though before this review came out I had already picked this Seagate drive as my choice if my hand were forced to get something. My 11900K desktop has TB4 (and thus USB4), but I'd prefer something backwards compatible with older USB as well. Samsung's X5 TB3 drive is the best thing going but no USB compatibility. For today, a USB 3.2 2x2 drive like the Seagate is as good as it gets if you want wide compatibility + decent speed.
  • PeachNCream - Saturday, August 28, 2021 - link

    Interesting product though it could stand to have a side-by-side release in beige with a more conventional single green activity LED so it matches my computer case. Its getting hard to color coordinate external components these days since everything is black and has a window in the side.
  • Targon - Sunday, August 29, 2021 - link

    There are many computer cases that don't have the clear side panel, but pre-assembled gaming computers will have them. To be honest, if you get a computer that isn't one of these generic OEM machines, even the ones with a video card, the clear side panel to allow you to see what is going on makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you have the two digit POST code display and your machine freezes up or doesn't reboot for some reason(so seeing that display actually helps). Being able to configure the LED is generally something that is getting included these days as well.
  • back2future - Sunday, August 29, 2021 - link

    Thanks, but we don't see purpose for deeper inspection on why LEDs are attracting to gamers. On users levels it adds visual attraction. Most interesting within non mainstream data paraphrasing is, that we could take these for reference for our research on AI dependent web search filtering, what earned some really inspiring replies here on Anandtech about that topic.
    If one wants to limit this to only one color, that would limit one approach for data quality related color output. That's just one approach on client side on these base line levels, but that would require faster interaction towards LED colors changing on devices (useful, but might require distro's drivers adaptation)? Don't know if worth effort, think, maybe better prepare for real improvements like mentioned for newer version file systems (or experimental fs' not yet released to public) and monitoring checksum's impact on cpu usage, recently? Experts did and it was impressive watching this additional data integrity monitoring dependent on LED colors output. If not visible, no information added to clients, easy. We would like to keep this on that expert quality level?
  • Dug - Sunday, August 29, 2021 - link

    Paint it.
    Beige is not commonly found on any case within the last 15 years.
  • Cullinaire - Monday, August 30, 2021 - link

    Only thing better is...discolored thru old age beige
  • Wereweeb - Tuesday, August 31, 2021 - link

    Considering that some games already exceed 200GB, and that it's likely things keep going in that direction, the DIY drive seems like a better deal to me. (Not buying anything WD for a few years after what they did with the SN550)

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