Customer Reviews

Samsung Story Station 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU010EB

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've seen complaints on another vendor's website about this drive being formated in FAT32 and the time it takes to reformat into NTFS. I did a "quick" reformat and it took only a few minutes to reformat into NTFS. This unit is nice looking and solidly built. I plugged the drive into the wall, the USB into the computer, started the back-up, had dinner and by the time I was back, the drive had finished the back-up. If only my Seagate internal hard drive worked this well. IMHO, you can't go wrong buying this drive.

On the strength of our very positive experiences with previous Samsung products, we purchased this drive to serve as a plain vanilla, last stop backup. It was used only about ten hours a week. It was connected to a new Windows 7 machine. It was never moved, disconnected, etc., and was run off of a battery backup. All the same, after being turned on just about four months to the day of first use, it immediately ground itself into oblivion. At a certain point it is good to just laugh, but to put trust in another one, no.

We are euphoric over our large kitchen appliance by Samsung - had a minor problem and support was great. With that background, along with good reviews on Amazon (the authority), we were ready to buy a Samsung external hard drive -
Great product if all goes well -
Formatted to NTFS without issue -
Documentation is very poor, between the PDF manual and the Help button - no mention of what to do when you receive some of those pesky error messages.
Have a few minor glitches that I thot could be resolved with a quick message to the support group - surprise! Received an auto reply with a link to download the backup software.
Obviously no one read the question. If I had not installed the software, I could not possibly have experienced the glitch which prompted the question. (I had already re-installed it just in case)
The auto back up feature is a good one - I am going to hang in with the Samsung for a while longer, and see if I can work out the glitches. If not, I can use Nero on a schedule.
Docs and support definitely not up to Samsung standards.

This is a great hard drive. I use it to store all my photographs (i'm an amateur photographer). I recommend that you transfer files to the drive as you would any typical internal drive, rather than use the autobackup software feature. I used this feature when I got it and had problems with files becoming corrupt. Otherwise, great drive and very handy for cleaning up my C: drive.

I was most impressed with the solid construction and high-quality aluminum case. Aluminum really helps to keep this drive cool, another big plus. I transferred 100gb non-stop from my other backup drive and it barely got warm. Incredibly quiet, too! No vibration or humming, fan ran smooth and quiet. I can't believe how good this drive is for the money. It WAS formatted in FAT32 and I should have read the other review about doing a "quick format" because I did a full format into NTSF and it took about 8 hours, causing me to hover over it all day like I was waiting for beans to cook. A small price to pay though considering you only need to do that once unless you like FAT32, then of course you don't need to format it. The only thing that would make this drive better would be a higher speed sata or other connection, but you'll be hard-pressed to find that in a drive this price anyway. Get this drive, you won't be disappointed - solid product for the money. Note that for a few bucks more you can also get a 1.5TB: Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU015EB

I was really looking forward to having a positive experience with this drive considering that most of the reviews for it are positive. However, mine was not unfortunately. I purchased 4 of these drives a couple months ago to store video production projects on them. One was used frequently (about twice a week if that) for backing up my projects. However, just today, that one drive would not turn on anymore. I tried different outlets, even opened up another box and used another power plug to determine if that was the problem but with no success. Sooo, I thought no big deal I guess i'll just use another one of the drives that I purchased; I back up my stuff on 2 different drives at a time (No data was lost thanks to that!). However... that new drive that I purchased would not turn on either... Same deal, tried different outlets and different power cords and NADA!!! Ok, by this time I was getting a little frustrated... Opened up the third box and BAaamm! Same issue... will not turn on at all. I finally concluded that I was not even going to bother pulling off the shrink wrap off the 4th box. This item is a defective design and consumers need to be aware of this problem before committing and trusting their valuable data to it. After calling Samsung and informing them about the problem, they did offer to RMA it, but with the most likely guarantee that I would get a refurbished product in return.... Let's see... a new product for another one that was fixed of it's defects... Hmmmmm.... no thanks! If you are serious about protecting and safely storing your data... look elsewhere. This harddrive will only cause you headaches, frustrations, and costly data recovery later on down the road (probably within a few weeks of purchase like me). I do have to admit that one great thing came out of this... Amazon gave me a full refund on this defective item which only made me a more loyal customer!! :) I maintain my confidence in purchasing through Amazon and will definitely continue to do business with them... Thank You Amazon... :)

Summary: Great Product at Great Price.
Bought (2) of these drives to use as my daily working computer drives. I'm running them on Windows XP with both my Dell laptop and Dell Dimension Desktop. Set-up only requires connecting the power supply and USB cables. Comes formatted as FAT32, reformatting to NTFS is simple using Windows XP. Runs cool even after 4 hours of continuous use. Solid case. Runs quiet. Read/write speeds are average and adequate for normal, everyday use. Plays video files OK, but if you want to run video files from a hard drive for home viewing, you might want to consider a faster connection model of this drive (e.g. firewire or eSATA).

Another gripe would be the ~3 second delay that it takes to 'wake up' from sleep mode. But more importantly, just after one month my Samsung Story Station 1TB External Hard Drive ceased to turn on, and no it wasn't a problem with the power cord. I took it to a Samsung customer service shop and all they could say was, "Ooops. Sorry. This happens to some devices randomly." Then he said that he would replace the hard drive and send it to me in a matter of days. Ok. When I asked if I could retrieve my ~250GB of data, he claimed that it would cost me over $200 to do so. Thanks, but no thanks. Don't trust a hard drive with important data and don't buy Samsung! (unless you're looking for a $150 paper weight)

really simple to set up, and to start a backup schedule with the included software. the light on the drive can be dimmed (pretty nice touch). drive looks good and works even better. so far the only con is that i had to pay for it

Pros
--Nice look and feel. The knob to turn it on feels smooth and everything on the hard drive looks well-made.
--Plenty of room for storage.
--No issues with it breaking down after 2+ years of use

Cons
--Sometimes it takes a few seconds to boot back up from stand-by mode, meaning if you play a song from your external after not using it for a few minutes, it will have a ~3 second loading time, which can be annoying.
--Bright LED light. I keep my computer in my bedroom, and even though the knob can make it less bright, I still have to keep it covered to eliminate light in my room. There should be a setting for the hard drive to be on, but the light to be off.