Seagate Genshin Impact SSD Review: Limited Edition External Storage

	Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD: MSRP $139 Seagate's limited edition Genshin Impact themed external SSD, offers a healthy 1TB of storage and speedy transfer speeds approaching 1GB/s.
	Slim And Lightweight Stylized Chassis Addressable Lighting Good Performance	Available While Supplies Last Price Premium Much Faster External SSDs Available

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Some products are more about style, nostalgia, or collectability, rather than pure utility or practicality. Such is the case with the Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition SSD we’ll be showing you here. Internally, there’s not much more to this drive than most other USB 3.2 external drives. The Seagate Genshin Impact LE offers transfer speeds of about 1GB/s, in a thin, light, highly portable little chassis that can connect to virtually any computing platform via an included USB-C cable. Adorning the packaging and case of the Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition SSD, however, is some distinctly stylized artwork from the anime-styled and hugely popular, open world Genshin Impact action role-playing game. More specifically, the drive and its packaging features officially licensed Cyno, the General Mahamatra, artwork and associated styling.

The drive is quite the looker – if you’re a fan of the game, of course. Let’s take a closer look and then dig into some benchmarks...

Genshin Impact LE External SSD Specs & Features

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Seagate hasn’t published any detailed specifications for its Genshin Impact LE external SSD, but they’re about on par with the company’s One Touch line of drives, which offer USB 3.2 connectivity and max transfer speeds just a touch over 1,000MB/s (1GB/s). This particular drive is currently offered only in a 1TB capacity.


In terms of its physical dimensions, the Genshin Impact LE external SSD measures about 11mm x 50mm x 3.8mm and weighs in at only 65g. The pictures here make it look bigger than the drive really is; it’s got a smaller footprint than a typical playing card, and is only slightly larger than a business card. It also feels very light in the hand and won’t be a problem to tote around in a bag anywhere.

The top of the drive features Cyno artwork we mentioned earlier, overlaid atop a black and purple chassis.


The bottom of the drive is mostly purple, with a faint gem in the background and a prominent Genshin Impact x Seagate logo, above a sticker with some certifications and serial / model number information.


All around the edges of the drive you’ll find lined artwork along with a thing bevel. The purple hue from the bottom of the drive is also visible on every side of the drive.


One end of the drive is home to its USB-C connector and an activity LED. And the other houses an LED light strip.


When you first plug in the drive (on Windows 11 at least), you’ll be alerted that the LED light strip is Dynamic Lighting compatible and can be managed via the Windows control panel. Seagate also has an app available, however.

We should also take a moment to talk about compatibility. Anecdotally, we found the Genshin Impact LE external SSD to work properly on a wide range of systems, from AMD and Intel desktops to notebooks, and game consoles, which is not something we can say for every external SSD. We've had mixed results with some other drives, which caused performance, reliability and compatibility issues, especially when rolling our own with some NVMe enclosures. We didn't do any definitive testing as it relates to compatibility, but it is something to keep in mind if you're shopping for an portable SSD and want a device that "just works" when you plug it in.

Genshin Impact LE External SSD Performance

In order to test the performance of the Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD, we enlisted the help of some straightforward benchmarks. First up is ATTO, a disk benchmark that measures sequential transfer speeds across a specific volume length with various block sizes. It measures transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

The Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD's read performance was right on-par with the Samsung T7, but the Seagate drive offered somewhat better write performance at the larger transfer sizes.

Next up are some numbers with SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs...

The ADATA drive we tested clearly takes the top spot here, but the Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD slots in behind it, a notch ahead of Samsung T7 with both reads and writes.

CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests both sequential and random small and mid-sized file transfers using incompressible data. It provides a quick look at best and worst case scenarios with regard to SSD performance, best case being larger sequential transfers and worse case being small, random transfers.


The 4K transfer tests tell a totally different story, though. At QD1, the Genshin Impact LE SSD has the best read speeds of the bunch, but its write land about in the middle of the pack. With the queue depth increased, however, the Genshin Impact LE SSD falls in behind the Samsung T5 and outpaces only the older T3 drive.

Genshin Impact LE External SSD: Our Conclusion

In terms of its specifications and performance, Seagate's Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD doesn’t stand out from the crowd. There are a smorgasbord of 1TB external SSDs on the market, with compact enclosures and transfer rates in the same ballpark. The vast majority of them are also more affordable than the Genshin Impact LE as well. At $139 direct from Seagate (this drive is exclusively available from the company’s website), this drive commands a good 20 – 40% premium over some other external SDS with similar capacity and performance.


Of course, none of the other drives feature officially licensed Genshin Impact artwork and aren’t limited edition collectibles either. The bottom line is, the Seagate Genshin Impact Limited Edition External SSD is an attractive, capable, drive that gets the job done, targeted specifically at super-fans of the game. If that’s you, and you’re in need of some external storage, Seagate's Genshin Impact LE may be a fun addition to your kit. But you really need to be a Genshin Impact enthusiast, because cheaper and faster drives are out there.