Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU015EB

by Samsung

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.7 x 1.6 inches ; 2.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B002C3S6V8
• Item model number: HXDU015EB
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 7, 2009

Product Description

Mfr Part Number: HXDU015EB Features: Two ways of backup: Scheduled or in real-time SecretZone: Secure area for my private contents SafetyKey for protecting your precious contents Power Saving mode: Automatically going into standby mode if there are 5min of inactivity LED brightness control by knob switch: lighting pattern change by operation mode Smart Power On/Off: Easy to set up, easy to use Capacity: 1.5 TB Interface: USB 2.0 Max External Transfer Rate: 480 Mbps Operating System: Windows Vista/ XP Home/ XP Professional/ 2000 Pro; Mac OS x 10.4.8 or later Form Factor: 3.5 inch

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid, Quiet, Attractive, External Hard Drive, November 3, 2009

By 

Glenn R. Howes (Nashua, NH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU015EB (Personal Computers)

I have been using this drive for a few months and I have been very happy with the purchase. I've bought over a dozen external hard drive and external hard drive cases in my life, and this is the best USB drive I've ever used.

I no longer go the el-cheapo route of putting a cheap OEM hard drive in a cheap case; I've had too many short lived drives that way. That's why I was interested to see a large consumer electronics manufacturer like Samsung was dipping its toes into consumer level external hard drives. I've had a good experience with other Samsung products and that was good enough for me to try this new product line.

I am using this drive attached to an Apple Airport Extreme in my TV equipment cabinet. Given its usage, it has to fit into its surroundings, be quiet, and energy efficient. It's been there for 3 months and I've had zero problems with it. It doesn't get hot. It makes no noise I can hear from the couch. [Update: In the quiet of the night, I've realized that the drive makes an audible click when spinning up from low power idle. And there is a barely perceptible low frequency throbbing when in use, but this is only perceptible in the dead of the night; the clock on the wall, and the drive in my laptop are louder under these conditions.]

The big dial on the front allows me to turn down the activity light to a non-distracting level. The 1.5 terabytes are luxuriously large as I dump large media files for archiving from any computer in the house. I've no complaints about performance, but I doubt the drive would be the limiting factor in my wireless file transfers. Someone needing a more performant drive would be shopping for eSATA or Firewire 800 drives instead of this energy sipping USB drive.

The case itself is solid and well made. I would think the use of aluminum allows it to better cool the drive. In addition, I believe the drive uses less power when idle for a bit, again allowing the minimization of fan noise.

Not one to gratuitously give out 5 star reviews, I was considering giving it 4 stars, but really the only thing to say against it is its list price is higher than lesser quality drives.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works great. I like having the on/off switch too., February 15, 2010

By 

R. Getler (Lexington, KY) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU015EB (Personal Computers)

I purchased the 1.5TB Story drive after getting tired of the effort to manage a bunch of smaller drives to store my family's pictures, videos, and movies.
I formatted mine NTFS right out of the box.


PRO - On/Off Switch

The round dial on the front of the drive acts as both an on off switch and a dimmer for the LED light on the bottom front of the drive.

I really like having a power on/off switch right on the front of the drive. I use my drives for archiving the family jewels (pics of may family) so I prefer to keep the drive turned off when I am not actively working on the archive. A powered off drive can't be infected, accidently deleted, and is likely harder to zap during a lightning strike. I have an external Seagate "FreeAgent" drive too but I get tired of pulling the power plug out of the back of the drive casing (no on/off switck) just to take the drive off line.

PRO - 1,500 GB on-line for $130
It is great to have some much disk space sitting under one drive letter.

CON (Minor): The drive does seem to 'park' after some idle time and then needs a few seconds to spin-up if re-accessed. Doesn't bother me since if I was looking for a high performance drive I would not be using a USB connected drive to begin with.

Overall:
I like it well enough and just bought a second 1.5TB Story drive to retire even more older, smaller disks.

Good drive.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Performer!, February 7, 2010

By 

M. Paschall "Computer Geek" (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HXDU015EB (Personal Computers)

I've been using this drive for a bit over three months now and it has not given me one problem yet! This is one solid built drive by a company with an excellent reputation, and it shows.

I'm a bit of a digital pack rat and with the size of media files getting larger by the day the old method of backing up information to DVD just isn't cutting it and Blue Ray burners and media are still too expensive to be a viable option currently. The solution? Hard disk backup! I routinely back up my DVDs as ISO images to this drive and mount them via a "virtual DVD drive" to watch and access. This drive handles the transfer of information fast enough that you'll never notice it's working over USB 2.0. One thing of note is that after a certain amount of idle time the drive goes into energy saving mode, spinning down the platter. When you access the drive again it takes about 10 seconds to spin up. For someone like me this is not a major issue.

I've had some recent bad experiences with drives from both Seagate and Western Digital and after reading about Samsung getting into the external drive game I figured a company like that would stand behind their products much better than the previously mentioned companies. However, I've not had ANY problems with my Samsung Story Station so it's a win-win for me.

Like any technology device there are some pros and cons...

Pros:
Attractive, all-metal enclosure looks great on my desk
No heat and hardly any noise with this drive
Speedy data transfers over USB 2.0
Works with both my Windows 7 desktop and my Macbook
Great value for the size

Cons:
Comes formatted FAT32 (which is a good thing for some if you're bouncing back and forth between Windows and Mac OS X, I reformatted to NTFS)
White LED light on bottom that stays on when the drive is turned on, although you can dim it some
You'll want to buy a second or third

As I stated in the cons I reformatted my drive to NTFS which allows for larger file sizes to be accommodated, a must for me as I'm creating ISO files of between 7 and 8GB. Mac OS 10.6 can read from NTFS and can write to it via a third party software solution. However, if you were looking to use this in a Mac OS only environment I'd recommend a reformat to a more Mac friendly format and journaling the drive. The reformat to NTFS took all night so be prepared for that if you don't want to stick with FAT32.

Overall I cannot stress how happy I've been with this external drive and I'm already looking to buy one or two more in the near (six months) future.