How do you decide on an external 3.5″ hard drive? What’s inside the box doesn’t really matter — anything made by Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba or Samsung will work the same (exceptions are the high-performance drives with extra cache or 10,ooo RPM speeds). So the decision rests on a balance between price and looks. And now, on knobs.
Samsung has released the oddly named Story (a terrible pun on “store”, we imagine) and it ticks the style and value boxes. 1TB wil cost £83 ($137), and the box is a smart-looking mix of brushed metal and matt-black plastic reminiscent of early 1990s stereo equipment. But one look will tell you that Samsung has pushed the design-dial up yo 11: There’s a knob on the front.
What does it do? It acts primarily as an on/off switch, but once you have decided on which side of that binary choice to stand, you can tweak it further. Twisting the knob will change the brightness of the drive’s power light. Useless? Perhaps, although being able to turn the thing down might make it easier to sleep at night: I have a pretty modest range of hardware in my bedroom and I still have to make a tour at night covering the blinkenlights with my discarded underwear. Hopefully Samsung will still be making these when ZFS becomes a widespread file system, allowing us to make a pun-tastic nerd-titled post “Never Ending Story”.
The Story is also stackable, USB-only and comes in both 1 and 1.5TB sizes.
Product page [Samsung via Reg Hardware]
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