This 5TB Seagate Astro Bot hard drive is an astronomically good alternative to the rising costs of SSDs

The Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition Game Drive is cuteness personified, featuring easily one of the best external PS5 hard drives designs I've ever laid my eyes on. This officially licensed drive is based on the Astro Bot game, and features not just adorable art of my favorite PS5 mascot robot, but it even comes packaged with stickers for good measure.

Like the plain white Seagate Game Drive, this external HD provides extra storage at a cheaper cost than the best SSDs for gaming on the market. That's because it doesn't quite match the speeds of a solid-state drive, and it can only store PS5 titles and not run them. Still, this Seagate drive is full of value.

For $159.99 / £149.99, you get access to up to 5TB worth of space, which is an astronomically good deal at a time when game storage prices are in flux. I have spotted some retailers listing it for a higher $179.99, but you won't struggle to find it at both US and UK retailers for its launch price. Astro Bot fans and game storage hunters alike have plenty to gain from adding this HD to their PS5 setup.

Design

I never thought I'd be gleefully yapping on about the look of a storage but here we are. The Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition gaming hard drive is an adorable sight to behold.

No crevice of this white block has been left free of adorable Astro Bot imagery. The top-facing side features art of Astro looking triumphant with his hands on his hips, with the planet sitting behind him. Each of the four corners of this side of the drive also include drawn on bolts, which give it the appearance of a piece of tech you'd collect in the TeamASOBI platformer - a detail I can't stop gawking over.

This must've been the plan all along. The edge of the HDD features two bright blue eyes that match up with the DualSense controller vehicle Astro rides in the game. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this Seagate drive one day made a cameo in a future update. What I adore specifically about the eyes is that they also happen to be found on the first limited edition Astro Bot DualSense PS5 controller. Not all licensed gaming accessories made by different brands (Seagate and Sony) have to match. Yet, when they do, it's hard not to be a fan.

Just below these eyes, there's a glowing blue strip of LEDs. This was already a design choice for Seagate's basic Game Drive, but it feels more at home with this version, which is inspired by Astro's blue and white coloring.

Even the back of the HDD, which you'll never see once it's hooked up to the PS5, has unique art of its own. It's not as elaborate as the front, but you can find a silver silhouette of Astro's face, and the Astro Bot and Seagate logos together underneath.

Features

The Astro Bot Limited Edition Game Drive includes the HDD, an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable, a pack of stickers, and a redeemable code for PlayStation Plus Premium right in the box.

The little white box also measures at 0.846in × 3.188in × 4.822in and only weighs approximately 266g. Additionally, like most external hard drives, it can also run PS4 games without having to resort to moving the game's location to the console's onboard storage.

Regretfully, the provided USB cable is far too short for those sporting a horizontal PS5 layout, and I found that out the hard way. My livingroom counter space is precious, and so I had to resort to resting the HDD on top of the Sony console at all times. I don't recommend anyone else do this, especially as the PS5 can get pretty hot. However, with zero room to change to a vertical setup, I was left to make do with what I had available to me.

Performance

The best SSDs for PS5 let you know of the PS5 benchmarked speeds the moment you boot up your PS5, but that's not the case with external drives like this. That being said, I did put the Seagate hard drive through the CrystalBenchMark tool on my PC rig to discover that it has average 144.41 MB/s read and 141.77 MB/s write speeds, which is pretty much expected for a drive of its caliber.

Speeds are always important, but less so with external drives like this one. As you can only store PS5 games, it's more about the capacity on offer. Even Seagate's marketing spiel is all tailored around the Astro Bot Game drive, providing "storage that shines" and doesn't list its average read/write speeds as a selling point. That being said, I still wanted to put it through its paces for this review, to see how it stacks up against the onboard storage of the current-gen Sony console.

I knew from the get-go this hard drive wasn't going to outmatch the speeds of the internal SSD. Yet, I was still surprised to discover that booting up the 40.88GB first-person shooter Prey loaded in an average of 34.96 seconds from the 'Play Game' button straight to its start menu. The onboard SSD was definitely quicker, coming in at 32.79 seconds, but it wasn't too far behind.

It was a similar situation with The Witch and the Hundred Knight Revival Edition, one of my favorite PS4 RPGs. It loaded up in an average of 26.62 seconds via the drive, and 25.30 seconds on the PS5 itself. If you were at all worried that grabbing a hard drive over an external SSD would make a dramatic difference in loading times, you'd be happy to know that the differences were barely noticeable in practice.

Additionally, transferring times weren't too bad either. I managed to transfer over 40GB worth of Prey from the Game Drive to the PS5 in 6 minutes, and the 3.33GB of The Witch and the Hundred Knight in as little as 34 seconds. After this review, my first step is to move them back, as I much prefer having all my PS4 digital games in one place. Not to mention, 5TB is plenty for them.

Seagate boasts that the HD can actually store "up to 60 epic game titles", which includes both PS4 and PS5 titles, but that will entirely depend on what games you like to play. AAA titles are going to be more storage-demanding than older indie darlings. As someone who's been cultivating more of a PS5 game library over the years, I did struggle to fill up the drive, but I do prefer to rely on internal Gen 4 drives like the Lexar PLAY 2280 SE PS5 SSD, which is currently in my console's M.2 slot.

Should you buy the Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition gaming hard drive?

The ongoing RAM shortages have made game storage pricing pretty scary. As of the time of this review, the Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition Game Drive has thankfully remained at its $159.99 / £159.99 MSRP, and that's a huge motivator as to why I highly recommend it to PS5 owners - particularly those privy to the Astro Bot game series.

You can't run PS5 titles straight from this drive, so it's not the best alternative to an M.2 SSD if that's what you're looking for. Yet, with similar capacity drives, like that of the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD (heatsink model) costing upwards of $649.99 (as of February 2026), this Astro Bot Game Drive is a nice sight to behold. It's even only $10 higher than the cost of the non-limited edition Astro Bot version of this drive, which is a tiny markup where licensed gaming tech is considered.

Comparing this HD against the best SSDs feels a little silly, especially as I know those particularly on the hunt for an M.2 PS5 drive want to be able to run games, rather than just store them. Yet, it's one of the best alternatives you can find on the market right now, especially if you want extra storage and to up the cute factor of your PS5 setup at the same time. Let's just hope its price doesn't take an astronomically bad turn any time soon.

How I tested the Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition gaming hard drive

I hooked up the Seagate Astro Bot Limited Edition gaming hard drive to my PS5 for two months while testing it for this review. In that time, any and all PS4 games from my existing game library and PlayStation Plus Premium were downloaded and stored directly on the drive, including Prey, The Witch and the Hundred Knight Revival Edition, and Power Rangers Battle for the Grid.

During the last few months, I also timed with a stopwatch how fast games like Prey loaded straight from the HD, and compared them to the loading times on my PS5's onboard storage, by taking an average from 3 tests in total. To read more about the ways we test PS5 SSDs and the rest of our gaming tech, have a look at how we test PS5 SSDs and hard drives, and our hardware policy.

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