Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've bought 6 Samsung Story Station hard drives: 3 1TB, 2 1.5 TB, AND 1 2TB. 3 of the 6 have died. This drive worked flawlessly for about 6 months with very light use. Then, it just wouldn't turn on again. It wasn't the power adapter. I contacted Samsung and they said they couldn't save my data from the drive if I returned it to them. So, I looked around and finally found a guy on ebay who recovered my data to another hard drive for $14.95 . I will not buy another Story Station.

This is clearly one of the better backup drives -- handsome, well-built, convenient. One can argue over its crotchets but most owners would agree. Certainly its not-so-instant on and clicking noise take getting used to, and as for the included backup software, forget it; it spends hours searching and must lovingly ponder every last file, whether backed up or not, and it will back up at the slightest provocation when unimpeded. If you have lots of files reformat the drive into NTFS and use SyncToy. Also the controversial rotary on-off switch can lull you to inattention; if you've put recovery software on the drive and you fail to shut it down (and you must click on the Safely Remove Software icon for that) your next logon your computer will go straight into recovery mode. It's probably best to leave it uncluttered by recovery software and always-on, despite the equally controversial night light (it doesn't bother me). All this said the Story Station does its job, and it does it well. I'm guessing the Story Station Plus with eSATA (which Amazon.com does not sell; it's available elsewhere) does it even better.

I am a photographer & we also do graphic design, and use external drives to back up our files. Thankfully, I had a second backup drive where all of my info was stored, but I had two of these exact units fail within a month of eachother. I have replaced them both with a different brand. This is a REALLY BAD PURCHASE. These are NOT reliable. Samsung was not great with the customer service, either, so we just decided to use another brand from now on. My 3rd Samsung 1.5 tb Story is still working from all appearances, but it is just a few months old. So, time will tell if this one will fail or not. I wish I hadn't bought the third unit at this point.

I've bought two of these now - a 1.0 TB and a 1.5 TB. They run very quietly, and I've had no problems. The price is very good compared to other drives. The on/off power switch on the front I find very useful, as I can easily power them off at the end of the work day, to ensure minimal wear and tear. Also with the two of them, while they don't click into place on top of each other, you can stack them and maintain proper air flow, which is a nice feature. Overall what a great product!

After two months of light use, one day it just failed to power up. I experimented with all the usual-- checked the power cord, usb cable etc.. and even shook it lightly but to no avail. It was completely dead. A few days later I tried again. Turned the drive upside down with the power cable plugged in and the power switch on. This time however I smelled something burning and the moment I saw smoke coming out of the bottom vent, turned power off immediately! It's going back to Samsung. I don't care if they can't recover data as I have data backed up elsewhere. But it's my first and last experiment with a Samsung hard drive. I doubt they even manufacture these themselves. I should add that I generally like Samsung products. The monitor I am looking at as I type this is 22" Samsung LCD.

The retro elegance and timeless design of this Samsung unit are most desirable. It's quiet, efficient, and does not compete with its surroundings for attention. Since it's stackable, I would definitely buy another one when the time comes.

I have owned many different external HDDs. This is one of my favorites. I like that the light has a dimmer knob. It is quiet, has unassuming looks, stable (won't fall over, obviously), and doesn't (as of last year) come with any embedded auto-backup functions that can't be formatted out. I've never run into that personally, but had read about it when I began researching this drive last year.

Anyway: it's been a good, solid HDD, no complaints. I run it wirelessly, attached to my Airport Extreme. I have owned it for over a year, and it gets continual use. It will auto-sleep, and takes about 5-10 seconds to wake up if it hasn't been used for a while, which is nice. I think I'll be able to stack two on top of each other securely.