Samsung Story Station USB 3.0 Hard Drive Review

Samsung Design - Understated Elegance
There's something mystically alluring about brushed aluminum. In the hands of a craftsman who knows the significance of refrain, it can be made into something that commands an aura of sophistication whilst presenting only a modest appearance. Samsung Story Station 3.0's enclosure is a clear embodiment of this design philosophy in an age that's defined by the economy of plastic. Granted, only the top cover is actually made from aluminum, but this is quickly overlooked since both the front and back panels follow the same simplistic curvature and bear close to the same metallic luster.

The Samsung's understated design extends beyond its clean lines and choice of material. Perhaps what's most enticing about this hard drive in particular is its sullen gray retro appearance; it blends into just about anything that's either black or wooden in nature. When combined with a simple text logo silk-screened in red and the highly unusual power control knob, the drive evokes some serious imagery of vintage headphone amplifiers.

To answer the obvious question of "why use control knob instead of a button or switch", the answer lies in the down-firing LED that's hidden from view. The further the knob is turned to the right, the brighter the LED will become. At its lowest setting, the light casts but a faint glow - perfect for sleeping in the same room as the computer. Crank it up and the glow is significantly filled out, yet maintains a feathered appearance that's just as aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately this effect is ruined as soon as the light starts to flash from data transfer; perhaps a pulsating glow would have been the better choice here. Depending on the drive's connection, the light will either glow blue for SuperSpeed USB 3.0 or green for Hi-Speed USB 2.0. It should also be noted that unlike many external USB hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital, the power knob's on/off status is absolute - the drive won't switch on at its own volition.

One last design aspect worth mentioning is that the USB 3.0 drive runs silent and is entirely convection cooled from slits that run along the underside and back of the enclosure. Aiding in this process is the fact that the hard drive is part of Samsung's eco-friendly F3 series, spinning at a relaxed 5,400 RPM to limit power consumption and acoustic noise. While this won't win any benchmark competitions in the long haul, for simple backups and mass storage it is more than sufficient.

Bundled Software
Two pieces of software from the Korean developer, Clarus, are bundled with the Story Station 3.0, allowing users to both encrypt and backup their data without the need to go out and buy anything extra. Since these titles are included on the hard drive itself and not on a CD-ROM as is common practice nowadays, Samsung hosts the installers on their website in case you forgot to back them up before reformatting. You may wish to download these installers anyway since their versions are newer than what's included with the drive.

Unfortunately, I could never get the bundled SecretZone encryption software to work on either of my 64-bit Windows 7 machines, even after downloading the latest v2.0.510 update that explicitly purports compatibility with 7. The program would always bug out on launch with the error message, "Service program is not running." I can only presume that this is referring to the "MSSvc.exe" service that wasn't even registered in the first place. 32-bit versions of Windows may have better luck with this one; I haven't tried.

Looking through the program's manual, however, SecretZone appears to be similar in function to the freeware TrueCrypt program that I've always recommended. It requires administrator rights to function, and will create software-encrypted volumes that are mounted under separate drive letters. Under FAT32, these volumes are curiously limited to 2GB. Unlike TrueCrypt, SecretZone does not offer plausible deniability nor does it come in Mac or Linux flavors, so really there's no reason to bother fighting with it when a better-established and feature-filled alternative exists.

Moving on, Samsung Auto Backup (a rebadged Clarus IntelliStor Pro) had no issues running on my system, and I was delighted to see just how easy it is to use without suffering from being too simplistic. Post-install, the program walks through a quick wizard that configures the encryption password and sets various backup options such as compression/encryption, file revisioning, what file extensions to backup or exclude, and backup scheduling.

What's impressive is that immediately after completing this wizard, a first-time backup copied my entire Documents folder to the Story Station, and the program was automatically set to perform backups in real-time after that. In other words, the Samsung Auto Backup would monitor and backup any file changes as they occurred, regardless of my backup schedule. This is of great benefit to just about everyone, provided that file revisioning is enabled in order to protect against data corruption or accidental saves. Alternatively, it's possible to tell the program to just stick to the schedule and only do traditional backups, saving system resources in the short term at the expense of longer backups.

File/folder selection and exclusion works just as you'd expect it to, and in a rare move for bundled backup software we're also able to backup from networked locations. The ability to select a backup destination other than the Samsung hard drive is notably absent; though that's understandable considering the program could otherwise be freely used with any hardware, not earning the developers a cent.

While file revisioning can be set to maintain an unlimited amount of past revisions or limited to a small handful in order to save on space, unfortunately that's about the extent of Samsung Auto Backup's automatic space reclamation. Instead it's up to you to manually free up room, but at least process is simple. From any given directory in the backed-up list it's possible to delete all previous file revisions, files without sources, or anything that's older than a certain date.

In short, Samsung Auto Backup does just about everything I could want it to for a backup utility, shy of backing up my Windows system state and applications. Oh well, there's always the new Windows 7 backup for that. Kudos to both Samsung and Clarus for delivering a contender capable of going toe-to-toe against Memeo Backup. Though the design and documentation may not be as polished, the interface sure as hell is a lot snappier.