Comments on: HDDCoffee

By: psichron

psichron — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:22:48 +0000

The nice thing about the story station is that the aluminium chassis is excellent for keeping it cool so it won’t overheat even if it doesn’t spin down. There is no purpose to the LED getting brighter, it’s just for the look, it doesn’t do anything else.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:06:21 +0000

I use the samsung story plugged into my xbox 360 for viewing films. The power down occurs when you want to pause the film come back after 5 minutes. Its a bit of hassle but not a deal breaker. Saying that i think i would be more upset if all my films were lost because the hdd had overheated because its on all the time. One question if you turn the switch on and it clicks on then you keep turning the LED it gets brighter does this mean something??? what is the purpose of the LED getting brighter? any ideas??? Thanks in advance

By: corvus coraX

corvus coraX — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:54:41 +0000

Great job with HDDCoffee!! I had the same problem (not so hard but at little disturbing) with my Samsung Story HDD. Now, it works OK, thank you!
c.c.

By: psichron

psichron — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:10:55 +0000

As far as I know it is the Samsung ecogreen F2: “While it’s still not nearly as capacious as Western Digital’s latest green hard drive, Samsung’s 1.5TB EcoGreen F2EG is still plenty roomy for most. Of course, we’re still trying to decide if both “Eco” and “Green” were really necessary in the model name, but we digress. The drive sports 500GB per platter, and reportedly, it sucks down less power (around 40 percent less, in fact) than most HDDs thanks to the awesomely named EcoTriangle technology.”

By: Snout_Puff

Snout_Puff — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:17:37 +0000

Has anybody opened their 1.5/1.0 Samsung Story Station to discover which model Samsung drive is installed? I’m curious to know this before I buy.

By: psichron

psichron — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:13:45 +0000

Hi mikejamm, thanks for the words of support! Always nice to get a positive comment, let me know if there’s anything HDDCoffee still needs.

About formatting the drive: Yes, I can highly recommend formatting it in NTFS. It’s a 1.5TB /1TB drive, presumably people who need that kind of space are going to be working with files larger than 4GB which is the FAT32 filesize limit as you said.

The utilities that come with the drive is useless to me, you can see whether you think they are interesting but I just deleted them. Then to format: In windows, open control panel -> Administrative Tools (Use search if you are using Win7) -> Computer management. In the left column select “Disk Management” under “Storage”. In the middle-top column, select the Samsung story station (The one with a capacity of 1397.26GB). Right-click on it and say “Format” or otherwise “Delete Volume”. Here you can make custom paritions for the drive if you want, I just use a single large partition. Then just tell it to format it with NTFS (Important: Select the “Quick Format” checkbox, otherwise you’re going to wait hours to format!!!). If you have any trouble just google a little, you should find an answer. The most important thing is to check the “quick format” checkbox…

By: mikejamm

mikejamm — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:30:27 +0000

Sorry, meant to say thanks for the cool HDDCoffee software “app”, not amp. lol! Thanks again.

By: mikejamm

mikejamm — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:25:49 +0000

Hi psichron , thanks for the great review and cool amp for the samsung story station. Just wanted to ask, I’ve read some post where this hard drive come fomatted in FAT32, so no files over 4GB, but most people are reformatting the drive for NTFS. Do you recommend this and how do you go about doing it if so. Thanks. mikejamm

By: bbbobbbo

bbbobbbo — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:29:38 +0000

great app there, psichron. bought myself a story station as well so i’ll guess hddcoffee will be a constant presence on my OS from now on. a big THANK YOU

By: psichron

psichron — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:36:19 +0000

Hi Claudiu,

Thanks for the feedback! About your request: There are already apps that do just that.
First, try this: “Windows Media Player (WMP11 in my case) has an option “Allow Screensaver during playback” which you can deselect. Then you play any old video, and press pause.”
If that doesn’t work, check out these: http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/stopss/
or
http://software.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=746745

There are apps that do what HDDCoffee does as well, but I found that they didn’t operate as I wanted. I wrote HDDCoffee to be as small, unobtrusive and light-weight as possible.