Samsung Story Station 1.5TB External USB Hard Drive

Exelent peice of hardware, hard brushed steel case and if im right this is the only Ex-Hard drive that has a power switch out there. Draged all my stuff over on it left on for 5 hours (27,000+ files 338gb) with no fails. Did not emit much heat after 5 hours constant usage and cooled quick. At £95 this is a bargin stairing you bam smack in the face. Transfer rate 30 -35mb per/s ,No noise and the only thing thats in the way and not at the same time is the light (but good in a way as you know its still on). If your after NTFS this is best value for money.

Im not going to comment on the delivery time as these reviews are meant for the actual functioning of the product which Im not exactly pleased about. After having recieved the item plugged it all in, turned it on. Windows detected the drive it worked just about (sometimes refusing to turn on and boot or giving random beeps) for about a week then failed completely. I would like to think that this is an isolated incident as samsung are not exactly a small company. This is cheap money for a 1.5TB drive and i got what i paid for. It makes it even worse that this is obviously intended as a backup device or for transferring data and it has failed within a week of being recieved. In my oppinion and experience a poor product, one to be avoided.

Bought this on Tuesday night about 7pm and it arrived today (Thursday) so very quick delivery, once I opened it looked good, plugged it in and it booted up quickly with no problems at all, transfer rate is around 20mb/per second which is useful when you can be transferring around 8GB of info at a time, (or 15GB at the moment) extremely quiet, no louder than my computer which is very quiet itself. Easy to turn on and off and the dimmer switch on the light is good, although I can't decide whether to have it bright or not on the mirror finish on the top of my computer tower. 5 Stars all round!

I've tested this on a few systems both Windoze and Linux. In windoze, it takes the drive, from power on, about 30seconds to initialize, so there is a delay as the computer appears to freeze as it mounts the drive. In linux there is a small delay , but not as long as the win xp one.

The data rate is a sustained 16.5MB/sec which is based on a FAT32 file system. The other reviewer must have formatted to NTFS

To maintain read/write capability on all 3 formats - Win/Mac/Linux , the drive comes formatted to fat32.

The total size of the drive after a fat32 format is 1.36TB=1396.6GB.

If you mess up the drive & want to format it as fat32 , then don't try it in windows as after 32GB it will fail.

Lastly there is a dimmer light attached to the front underside, turning the on switch adjusts the brightness.