If Seagate's recent offerings are any indication, we live in the age of branded TV/movie tie-in storage products. Or, at least, Seagate does: The company's Spider-Man Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drive ($139.99 for 2TB), its first foray into the Marvel universe, is very similar in design and features to its Disney/Star Wars Mandalorian-themed Seagate FireCuda Grogu and Beskar Ingot drives. Designed to appeal to fans willing to pay a bit extra for the web-slinger's image, it's a solid-performing platter-based external hard drive, albeit one with a dated (no USB-C) connection and a rather short warranty.

Design: With Great Storage Comes Great Responsibility

The Spider-Man drive measures 0.6 by 3.2 by 4.8 inches (HWD), a typical size for portable external hard drives, and weighs 5.9 ounces. Its top and sides are red, with the top bearing an action shot of Spidey. Cool stuff, unlike the drive's underside where—along with certification info and a copyright nod to Marvel—you see a fat oval ringed by eight stubby legs, shown in dark blue against a light blue background. It's clearly intended to represent the logo on Spider-Man's back, but something is lost in the translation. [Agreed, I see more of a tick than a spider. —Ed.]

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 a USB Type-A port on your computer. There's a status light at the same end. USB-C support is notably absent; there's no second cable or USB-A-to-C adapter in the box.

The drive features RGB lighting, which by default is white but can appear blue (due to the blue base) depending on your viewing angle. You can customize the lighting scheme with the free Seagate Toolkit software.

Seagate backs the drive with a one-year warranty and provides a year of access to its Rescue Data Recovery Services. According to Seagate, the lab claims a 95% success rate for solid-state and hard drive data recovery. While access to the recovery service is a nice (and atypical) benefit, the single year of warranty coverage is skimpy. Most external drives are warrantied for at least three years, while many carry five-year warranties.

The Spider-Man drive we reviewed, which shows the traditional Peter Parker Spider-Man, is one of three available hard drives depicting different residents of the Spider-Verse. The others are Miles Morales, the hero of the 2018 animated movie, and Gwen Stacy, a.k.a. Ghost-Spider. Presumably Marvel and Seagate are keeping villains like Doctor Octopus, the Green Goblin, the Lizard, and Mysterio in reserve, though we'd like a shout out to Peter Porker, the amazing Spider-Ham.

Beyond that, the whole Marvel Universe awaits. Timed to coincide with the theatrical release of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Seagate has launched a line of Black Panther drives depicting King T'Challa, his sister Princess Shuri, warrior Okoye, and a Walmart-exclusive King of Wakanda drive.

Testing the Seagate Spider-Man Drive: On-Point Platter Drive

We ran our first two tests from a 2016 MacBook Pro using the laptop's Thunderbolt 3 ports with the Spider-Man drive in its default exFAT format. The Mac-only BlackMagic Disk Speed benchmark measures a drive's throughput for reading and writing various video formats. The Seagate drive landed in the middle of the very narrow range of scores tallied by recent external hard drives, though its folder copy results were slow even by platter drive standards.

We also ran our Crystal DiskMark and PCMark 10 Overall storage tests on our Intel X299 testbed with the Spider-Man drive reformatted in the Windows-centric NTFS format. It did well overall, with sequential read and write speeds as measured by Crystal DiskMark 6.0 proving typical of a portable hard drive. Its PCMark 10 overall score was near the top of the relatively small group of hard drives on which we've run the current version of that test.

A Drive to Get Your Spidey-Senses Tingling

The Spider-Man Special Edition FireCuda External Hard Drive is essentially the same product as Seagate's Mandalorian-branded Grogu and Beskar Ingot drives, aside from being preformatted in exFAT. The device delivered swift results in our PCMark 10 overall test but trailed in our folder copying benchmark.

As with similar gear we've seen, you'll pay a premium for the character's (here, Peter Parker's) portrait. Cost-conscious buyers will be better off with the Editors' Choice award-winning 5TB WD My Passport, which can be found for as little as 2.4 cents per gigabyte and offers a five-year warranty and hardware-based encryption. But true believers need not be deterred: The Spider-Man Special Edition is a solid product that's fun to use and makes a great collectible or conversation piece.