Samsung Intros Power-Efficient External Hard Drive

Trying to stay atop of its competitors, Samsung, one of the world's leading vendors of consumer electronics and computing products, has recently announced that its 3.5-inch external hard drive, dubbed STORY Station, will be the industry's first external hard drive to boast a standby power consumption below one watt. The updated hard drive is expected to become available starting this November and is said to meet the reduced standby power level requirements of the forthcoming European Union's EuP (Energy Using Products) directive for Standby Regulation.

“User requirements for external hard drives now include eco-friendliness and lower power levels in addition to performance, reliability and exceptional design,” said C.H. Lee, vice president, Storage sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Samsung’s STORY Station, which has been praised for its appealing external-drive design, takes a huge step forward in setting the stage for the timely introduction of environmentally-conscious hard drive technology.”

The Samsung 3.5-inch STORY Station external hard drive has been designed to provide customers worldwide with a choice for storage capacities ranging from 500GB to 2TB. The external drive has also been featured with Samsung's Auto Backup functionality, helping users preserve data, while the SecretZone software application offers a solution for data encryption, alongside the SafetyKey application, which enables password protection on the STORY external drive.

According to Samsung, the reduced power level for the standby mode has been achieved with the help of a new circuit structure that puts the drive in a non-operational state, when the power cable is still connected but the USB port is not. This design enabled Samsung to reduce the standby power consumption by over 95%, to 0.9W, down from the conventional level of 2.5W. Samsung is the first company to introduce this low standby power solution for the 3.5-inch external hard drive segment.