Samsung Story Station HX-DU015EB Review

I recently acquired the 1.5TB Samsung Story station (HX-DU015EB) and I really couldn’t be happier. Initially I wanted to go for the Seagate Freeagent of the same capacity, but after seeing an almost 50% negative review rating on both newegg and amazon.com I decided to go with the Samsung instead which got excellent reviews.

The problem with the Freeagent is that the enclosure is terribly designed. Lack of padding, air-flow and heat-dissipation accumulates into a disastrous mix of  factors that result in a far higher-than-normal rate of failure. Please note that I’m not saying Seagate is bad, there’s nothing wrong with the drive inside the Freeagent, in fact the 3.5″ Seagate it’s based on is quite impressive. It is the enclosure that’s the main cause of the troubles, and unfortunately you just can’t get past that.

Enter the Samsung Story station: housing one of Samsung’s Ecogreen drives spinning at only 5400rpm it might not be the fastest beast on the planet but it does have two major advantages over the Freeagent: It runs quiet and cool. Since I only have a USB2 port available on my laptop, the lower read and write speeds didn’t bother me as the USB transfer rate would be the bottleneck anyway. Low noise levels and reliability are far higher concerns for me and in these categories the story station ranks highly. The external enclosure itself is pretty decent for its price and helps keep the drive cool with its brushed metal cover and air vents, and (to a degree) less vulnerable to small bumps with its internal padding.

I couldn’t be happier with the Samsung, but it does have one major drawback: In Samsung’s eternal wisdom and compassion for the planet, they decided to introduce a power-save feature that spins down the drive after 5 minutes of inactivity. I’ve read on forums that the Western Digital Mybook external drives also suffer from this flaw, although it seems their spin-down timer is longer. Unfortunately, this power saving mode can not be adjusted or disabled, and this makes for some frustrating video viewing when you pause for longer than 5 mins and have to wait for the drive to spin up again when you want to resume watching. Samsung, if you’re listening: for the love of Dawkins PLEASE LET US DISABLE POWERSAVE MODE. Fortunately the solution is a 30 minute coding session with HDDCoffee as the result (keeps your drive awake). I’ll write about it in my next blog post.