Samsung Story Station 1TB external HDD

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.