Review Samsung has been making hard drives for years, but it's taken a wee bit longer for it to decide that if Western Digital, Seagate and co. can extend their drive production efforts to nice, shiny external storage units for consumers, it can too.

Samsung's Story: strong and (almost) silent

What Samsung has lacked thus far is the design nous to take what essentially a generic product - the hard drive - marry it with some off-the-shelf electronics and then - here's the crucial bit - stick it all in an attractive enclosure. The innards are largely the same, so these days you differentiate one external drive from another almost entirely on looks.

And the new Story Station is cute, in a solid, muted Terminator kind of way. There's no bright chrome, no piano black glossiness, just a brushed gunmetal upper surface, and a matte black front, back and bottom.

The black and gun-metal grey complement each other well, as does the mix of curves and straight lines. While the sides of the Story curve from the top to the sides, at the front and back you get 90° angles. The base is suitably sculpted so that drives can be stacked. The feet are sturdy and well able to resist attempts to push the drive sideways.

The rear is home to the unit's single, mini USB port, power socket and some neat diagonally striped vent holes. The front, though, really caught our eye because it's the first on an external drive that sports a switch.

And no simple on/off rocker, this but a knob that first engages the power and then - get this - operates as a rheostat to control the intensity of the white disk activity light that glows downward under the front panel.

Turned on by a knob: ooh-err, missus

Now, we can safely say the light intensity angle is pure gimmick, but we do like the switch. Switches give you the sense of reassurance that the drive is ready to be disconnected from the mains and put away, something that simply dismounting the drive and yanking the power cord does not do.

Of course, if you keep your drive out and connected to a desktop machine permanently, that may not matter to you, but laptop owners who like to stash their kit away when it's finished with will, we think, be impressed.

Multi-Story: the Samsung's design makes it easy to stack several drives

The Story a solid product that feels like it has a bit of heft to it and would withstand a knock or two, a bit like LaCie's old metal-clad Porsche drives. It's not ridiculously heavy, either.

It's quiet, too. In a silent room, you might hear it but in a quiet office it didn't rise above the hum of distant traffic and the tap of Vultures on keyboards. During our tests, the upper surface at the drive didn't get hot.

The AC adaptor's a typical size for an external hard drive, but at least it's light. Alongside it in the box, you'll find an unnecessary Quick Start Guide and a USB cable.

On board the FAT32-formatted drive, Samsung has loaded its customary back-up and data encryption apps, both of which identical the versions we saw on Samsung's tiny S1 Mini 1.8in drive. Now, as then, they're competent applications that are useful to have, but nothing beyond what you get bundled with most external HDDs these days. Again, both are Windows only.

SecretZone allows you to create multiple virtual RAW, FAT, FAT32 or NTFS drives, all password-protected and stored as encrypted images on the S1. Security wonks will surely be impressed with its encryption offerings: it offers a choice of 128- and 256-bit AES, and the less well known Blowfish 448.

Only USB, no eSata

Auto Backup does exactly what it says: schedule backups to the S1 - or any other connected drive, including networked disks - and keep them updated with up to 999 generations of each file in the folders you tell the app to watch. It'll do a mass copy at the start, and then transfer files as and when they're created or modified on your computer. Backup archives can be password-protected and compressed or left at full size.

The FAT32-formatted Story proved a decent performer when copying a 2GB file to the drive and similarly transferring a folder containing 100 10MB files to the Story. Duplicating all these files was likewise performed with dispatch. The MB/s data speed figures in the chart put the Story up there with the best of the external drives we've tested.

File Transfer Results - Copy to External Drive

Data Transfer Rate in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

Samsung says the retail price for the 1TB Story is £84, and we expect to see it on sale for £70-80. That's par for a 1TB USB-only external hard drive, so the Samsung represents reasonable value. Add to that the fact that it's a good performer, it comes with a decent software bundle that majors on functionality rather than vendor branding and that it looks good, how can we not recommend it?

File Transfer Results - Duplicate on External Drive

Data Transfer Rate in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Longer bars are better

If it had some flaws, maybe? Well the Story doesn't. Some buyers might prefer an eSata or Firewire port, but they up the cost and not everyone has a computer fitted with these ports. The only other issue we can see is that it's held together with torx screws. Then again, anyone likely to want to replace the drive in Samsung's stylish enclosure is likely to have a set of torx screwdrivers anyway. No? Get yourself a Swiss Army Knife Cybertool.

So even the assembly's not really a hindrance. Inside, you'll find one of Samsung's own 3Gb/s Sata EcoGreen F2 drives with 32MB of cache and low power consumption characteristics.

And, as we say, we like that switch.

Verdict

Good looks, good performance, quiet operation, reasonable price, three-year warranty - what's not to like? This Story has legs and we think it'll run and run. ®

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