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Acer just unveiled its latest gaming PC range, the Predator Orion 7000, and along with all the usual internal hardware options you might expect, the company has offered up an extra feature that is a new one to us. This new Acer gaming PC includes a pop-out, hot-swappable SSD.
With Acer‘s Orion 5000 already our top pick for the best gaming PC you can buy – as a pre-made system that it – the Orion 7000 will no doubt deliver the sort of balance of performance and affordability as its brethren. However, it’s really the swappable SSD that’s the intriguing bit here.
The system works quite simply. There’s a small section on the top of the PC case that has a flip you can lift up to free the drive then you just pull the drive out. It’s as simple as that.
Except, when you actually pull the drive out you see that it’s not really an SSD as you would normally think of them for a PC – i.e. an M.2 drive like all the models we recommend in our best gaming SSD guide – but instead the drive is housed in a metal casing with a USB-C socket on its end. Housed in the depth of the hole that the drive is pulled from is then a USB-C plug into which the assembly plugs.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this is how Acer has had to implement a hot-swappable SSD because M.2 SSDs aren’t designed to be hot-swappable, both physically and in terms of potentially interrupted data transfers to the drive. However, we were none the less a bit disappointed to find what was described as a hot-swappable SSD as being just an external drive.
What we’ve yet to confirm with Acer, though, is if it’s a standard M.2 SSD that’s housed inside the removable module. If the company has made a system that makes it easy to buy a new M.2 SSD, plug it into this external housing and add it to your system where you can make data transfers to it before swapping out the drive internally, that could actually be a really useful upgrade assistant.
The rest of the Acer Predator Orion 7000 is a smart enough-looking gaming PC with a side glass windows and pre-installed version of the company’s new Predator CycloneX 360 AIO cooler that uses a clever airflow system where the gaps between the three fans have been removed to allow airflow to move across the fans. Up to Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs can also be configured in the new systems.
Pricing and a release date for the new PCs has yet to be confirmed but will no doubt be arriving soon.
For more on from Acer, check out its just-announced Acer Nitro 7 Blaze handheld and its new DualPlay gaming laptop concept, both of which are being shown off at the IFA trade show in Berlin where we’re reporting from the show floor.
