Brand NEW - Samsung STORY Station 1 TB USB 3.0/2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive

BRAND NEW AND SEALED

Samsung has gone with a most minimalist approach to the design of the STORY Station 3.0.

The body is made of grey brushed aluminum, with the front of the unit featuring just the power knob and red stenciled STORY.

A power knob is somewhat interesting, rather than a switch. But the knob has some limited use, turning it manages the brightness of the access LED on the front, within a limited range.

The LED is also interesting in that it's blue when in USB 3.0 mode and green when only operating under USB 2.0.

Overall the drive looks great, the metal body will blend in with just about any environment, even MAC users will probably be pleased with its styling. It's rock solid too, not that you'd want to, but the case could probably handle more than a little roughing up and be no worse for the wear. That's an upgrade over all-plastic housings, especially if the drive gets moved around with regularity.

Benchmarks

As we noted in the beginning, USB 3.0 is definitely faster than USB 2.0. In this case we ran the drive in both modes and we also benchmarked against the Western Digital MyBook 3.0. In most cases, we've charted all three values against each other so you can see both the comparative performance of the interface and that of the leading competing drive.

The Samsung STORY Station 3.0 2TB had a peak read speed of 109MB/s and a peak write speed of 101MB/s when connected over SuperSpeed USB 3.0. Under the same interface the Western Digital MyBook 3.0 1TB had a peak read speed of 124MB/s and 90MB/s write. When we connected the drive over a legacy USB 2.0 connection the speeds on the Station 3.0 dropped to 33MB/s read and 29MB/s write.