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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solid value for money, 24 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Story Station is a pretty fancy name for an external hard drive. So how does Samsung go about justifying such a wordy title? Well, most of the justification is plain old marketing blah blah, using buzz words such as "upload" in place of "copying files" and "jog dial" in place of "dimmer switch". The aforementioned switch is the only control on the box and serves the dual purpose of turning the power on and off and varying the intensity of the power on light located under the front edge of the enclosure (from a little too bright to "lights up the whole room" bright).
So, let's put the overzealous marketing aside and have a look at what you actually get.
The enclosure itself is simple and sturdy in its construction, but it would be a big leap to call it attractive. The nicest visual feature, the brushed aluminium cover, has a rather unfortunate brownish colour, which is very unflattering to say the least. At the time of writing the image displayed on Amazon is not a Story Station, I'd advise looking on Samsung's website to see what it really looks like.
Controls and connections are kept to the strict minimum, with the power switch on the front panel, while the back panel only has the power inlet and a mini-USB socket. The underside has open vents to allow cooling air to circulate, while the aluminium cover dissipates heat. There is no fan or other form of active cooling which would add noise. By curiosity I opened the enclosure and had a look inside. The drive is held very securely, but is mounted to the enclosure using rubberised blocks to help reduce vibration and noise whilst operating. My only grievance is that the drive can only be placed horizontally, not vertically, so it takes up a little more space on a desk than I would like.
As for the 1TB disc itself, it turns out to be a Samsung EcoGreen F2 drive, model number HD103SI. This is a 5400rpm drive with 32MB of cache and is a reduced power consumption model. Combined with the enclosure's automatic power saving function that turns the drive off after it has been idle for a few minutes and you find you've got a fairly energy efficient unit. In terms of performance, I benchmarked this Story Station against my other external drives for comparison, including a WD Caviar Black, another Samsung in the form of a Spinpoint F1 and a Seagate Barricuda 7200.11. The Samsung EcoGreen generally performed at similar transfer speeds to the other drives, though the USB link was probably a limiting factor, however both my Samsung drives had access times 25% slower than the other models, (which only really has an impact when manipulating lot of small files). This is probably due to the fact that this is a 5400rpm drive, whereas I usually buy 7200rpm models.
Finally, it is worth noting that this drive is factory formatted using the FAT32 file system, which, though accessible to more computer OS's (such as Macs and Linux systems), does limit the maximum file size to 2GB. It is easy enough to reformat, however, and Samsung has a special formatting utility available for download on their website should you wish.
This brings me on to the supplied software, probably the biggest unique selling point in terms of setting this drive apart from the competition. All the software (and the manual) is found on the Story Station itself, not on a separate CD/DVD, though it can also be downloaded from the Samsung website. There are two applications available; a fairly classic auto-backup software and a more interesting security suite that encrypts the files saved to the disc. "SecretZone" can also create multiple virtual discs of various sizes, which appear to Windows as extra external drives with their own drive letter. Anything saved to these virtual drives is encrypted and password protected, which makes for a very convenient secure storage system for your accounting files and so forth. The documentation for these features is a little light, but the setup is pretty simple and shouldn't be much of a hurdle.
To recap, despite being a little visually challenged and not 100% practical due to not having a vertical stand, I find that the Samsung Story Station is a pretty solid external drive with some very useful bundled software. All-in-all it seems great value for money, especially if you look up the cost of an internal 1TB EcoGreen F2 on Amazon, which retails for the same price as this external unit, which includes the enclosure, power supply, all the cables required and the bundled software. A good deal and a lot of storage space; recommended.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Capaciously capacious, 30 Aug 2009
The drive is packed very well in a thick foldable cladding. Unpacked the drive has a distinctly minimalist look with a knob on the front and two sockets at the rear. The picture shown here by Amazon is of an older Samsung external HD. The one supplied is sleek and brick-like clad in a brownish aluminium - looks very nice. It is simplicity itself to install: just plug in the USB and power cables, turn it on (the front knob turns on a light just below it and you can inc/dec the intensity of the light using the knob). WinXP automatically finds the drive and installs it.
First, you should make a copy of the supplied 800MB of software on the drive say to a DVD or other HD. The programs are backup and encryption utilities. The drive is formatted as FAT32. I use NTFS because it allows much larger file sizes, so I needed to reformat the drive. I backed up the software, then deleted the partition using WinXP tools and created another partition formatting it under NTFS. You can partition the drive into smaller units if you want. Formatted capacity is 1.36TB.
In use, the drive is quick. It's a Samsung EcoGreen 2 drive which against other such drives performs very well and is ideally suited to home PC use. I have an annoyingly slow Western Digital My Book 320GB USB 2.0 external HD and this Samsung Story eats it. Start up is nigh instant from its sleeping state. Large files are transferred very quickly. It's a great piece of kit that does what it is supposed to do. My only gripe is the price. Similar drives currently cost less...
Update:
I'd like to add that you can download the software from Samsung's site; it is a much smaller download than the 800MB off the drive - about 90MB. The difference is due to the drive having pdf manuals for nigh every language - you only need the one(s) you use. The software is fine if you need it, but you pay extra for it... I still think it's a good drive and am very pleased with it.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
quite expensive, looks great, currently not working, 22 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
BEWARE - AMAZON HAVE NOW TIED UP THIS REVIEW WITH THE WRONG PRODUCT
see link below to the product this refers to the story 1tb external HDD
In order to be fair to Samsung I should point out that this review is written at a point of frustration - I can't actually get this beautiful hard drive to work any more! So here is my tale of woe so far - hope this is helpful to other consumers in avoiding my mistake. And if you have any helpful suggestions don't hesitate to leave a comment.
Firstly the product. The current picture on the Amazon site is wrong. If you google it you will soon see what it actually looks like and it's very fetching. Mostly gunmetal housing - with a story logo on the front, and best of all a rotary switch which turns it on and off and varies the intensity of the white led which strobes away when the disk is in action. At full brightness it can put on quite a show. The power brick which goes with it is about as small as I have seen. On the HDD it's mini usb at the back - quite unusual in my experience - but at least it's a decent length. The disk is designed to sit flat - with the heat being dispersed underneath. It looks as though it's been designed to stack - but not having two I can't be certain, and I would think the heat dispersal would not recommend this.
Connection was easy - as you would expect. I connected to a PC running XP - it was found and installed quickly. The software is the standard Samsung products of back up and password protected zones. Transfer and read speeds are very good - the specs suggest that they would be near the top of the league for 1tb HDD. Certainly when I compared to a 1TB buffalo and a 500 gig `elements' the Samsung was equal if not better. I suspect that the hardware is now being limited by the speed of USB 2 - so we will have to wait to USB 3 in a year or so to get any significant improvement.
So what went wrong? Well the drive comes as FAT 32. So I decided to reformat to NTFS. Unusually (for me) I decided to follow the manual - which comes on the disk as a pdf. I had previously copied the pdf to my desktop - knowing that a reformat will wipe it. So I get on with it. All goes well until I am half way through deleting the partition - which then aborts because a pdf is in use. Somehow I am not looking at the one I have carefully copied to my desk top ....... Well, I won't go on but the net result is I have a HDD which is running but I can't get it to display. The Samsung support covers a lot but sends you in circles. Reformatting the disk is not easy when your PC can't see it. The download utility tool has the same problem. Plugging it into my lap top fares no better. I won't be beaten by it but grrrrrrr!
So aside from my problems should you buy this HDD? Samsung have done a good job in making what is generally a very utilitarian product have some character. The design is great. However the list price is very high and if you paid anything like that you could have paid over the odds by a factor of two. Shop around and you can pick up this 1tb version for only a little more that most other brand 1tb HDD. It does not have the facility to stand vertically so the foot print is bigger which might be an issue. The down lighting could be a love or hate feature - probably not so good if you are running it in a bedroom to watch movies from. Samsung have a good reputation and I would be very surprised if reliability was an issue. So overall this is a good product. Now all I have to do is get it to work!
see also Samsung Story Station 1.0TB USB External Hard Drive
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