Samsung Story Station 1TB review

Although Samsung is an established manufacturer of internal 3.5in hard disks, the oddly named Story Station is the company’s first desktop external hard drive.

The brushed metal and grey plastic enclosure looks sleek and is quiet, too. The front-mounted power switch also doubles as a dimmer for the disk activity light, which is a classy touch.

We were impressed by the Story Station’s performance in our file-transfer benchmarks. It’s one of the fastest desktop USB disks we’ve seen when copying both large and small files. This will help to reduce frustrating delays when copying large quantities of data.

The included backup software can back up your files in the background as you work, or according to a schedule. It can back up only files that have changed since the last backup, saving time, and can keep older versions of files, so you can revert to them if you make a change you later regret. The fiddly interface is more frustrating to use than it should be, though.

The Story Station is great value at 8p per gigabyte. It’s fast, well designed and wins our Best Buy award.