Samsung announced yesterday the introduction of a series of external hard drives, the S Series. The new Samsung line-up includes a 2.5-inch drive S2 Portable and a 1.8-inch HDD S1 Mini, which are coming to the market in a new sleek casing with a leather back-cover. The company has incorporated a USB controller within the conventional hard drive, making the new S Series available in a smaller case footprint compared with other competing external hard drives.

Through the introduction of the USB on-board technology, the manufacturer also managed to obtain reductions in what concerns the weight and the power consumption of the new products. Besides, the external hard drives family comes with a power savings intelligence program which has been designed to monitor the usage of the drive and turns it into a low power “sleep mode” if no activity is recorded for ten minutes.

The new S Series family of external drives comes with a Samsung Auto backup function which enables users to program the back up for schedule or in real time. The protection of files and data is ensured in the form of software-based AES-128bit or AES-256bit encryption through SecretZone. More data security is ensured via a password-protecting SafetyKey which allows the owner of the external drive to lock its data. Users are able to see at all times the amount of space that the drive has available or used, as well as the space designated for backup storage.

The new Samsung S Series of external hard drives offer both the 2.5- and 1.8-inch form factors. The S2 Portable is a 2.5-inch drive which weighs 154g and is available in capacities ranging from 160GB up to 500GB. The new S1 Mini comes in the1.8-inch form factor at a weight of only 91g. The drive is available in capacities of 80, 120 and 160GB.

According to the company, the S Series will hit the market in the fourth quarter of the year in the United States. Also, they are expected to come in four different colors, namely white, red, brown and black.