Samsung Story Station 1TB external HDD Samsung has been making hard drives for years, but it's taken a wee bit longer for it to decide that if Western Digital, Seagate and co. can extend their drive production efforts to nice, shiny external storage units for consumers, it can too. Samsung Story Samsung's Story: strong and (almost) silent What Samsung has …
But a _mini_ USB socket on a full size drive?!
Within easy reach of me at the moment I have something like 10^23 full size USB A-B cables, they are truly ubiquitous. When I cart external hard drives between home and work etc I don't usually bother bringing the lead, I leave it plugged into my home machine, it's one less thing to carry.
Whilst I have several mini ones they would take much longer to locate, because they're not used for as many things. And there's two types that look nearly the same but are incompatible.
Fine for devices that _need_ a physically smaller socket, a full size external HDD however does not.
When typical SATA internal drives were 50-60 Mbytes/sec read speed, attaching them externally via USB wasn't too much of a penalty. Nowadays though, internal SATA drives (including Samsung's drives) regularly exceed 100 Mbytes/sec - my Samsung F1 1TB internal does 116 Mbytes/sec read for example. USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of 60 Mbyte/sec "in theory", but I can only get around 32 Mbytes/sec on my external 500GB Samsung USB drive in practice.
All of this means that recent external USB SATA drives are horribly crippled performance wise - eSATA is one possible solution (but not many PCs come with that), but I think we're in "limbo" at the moment until PCs and external drives support USB 3.0. Personally, I've taken the decision to buy no more external USB hard drives until 3.0 is established (so that's at least a year and probably a new PC too...).
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Why did they ruin the otherwise rather pleasing frontal aspect (god, I'm sounding like an estate agent here...) of the drive with a hideous protruberance such as that power knob? It's not as if the average user is likely to need to switch it on/off so often that being around the front rather than the back is going to be a real benefit, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to adjust the activity light brightness more than once or twice. Putting it on the front rather than the back also means that you can't take advantage of the space behind the drive required for cable routing, and so the whole thing ends up being deeper than it needs to be.
And easily-accessible power switches aren't at all compatible with toddlers - if I had one of these drives sat next to the mediacentre PC, I'd give it a day at most until our 21 month old learned how to switch it on and off... In comparison, the FreeAgent drive already connected to the mediacentre has remained powered up without a break despite it also having a bright flashing white light on the front to attract his attention - the power switch on that is round the back where he can't see it, and so as far as he's concerned it doesn't exist.
Oh, and Sam, any chance you could send some of those full-size USB cables in my direction? I'm in the opposite scenario here - over-run with mini-USB cables and always struggling to find a spare full-sized one on the rare occasions I need an extra.
The many tentacled cable tree. It's a feature of many a geek room. Of course, you can never find the one you want, can you? Ever tried looking for a null modem cable or an APC dumb cable that doesn't kill the UPS as soon as DTR goes high making the whole thing as pointless as a muslin condom? You know you had one on that pile but, even though it was like dog turds underfoot and you wished the sodding thing would piss off last week, finding it now is an exercise in futility ;o)
Whilst on the subject, why is it that when I need an IEC lead with a BS1363 on the end of it all I can find is IEC M->F, yet when when I want a M->F...
Hmm, I like the idea of a knob on an external drive, but having a continuously variable LED is not the most productive use. How about having it control the accoustic/performance managment? That would be a differentiation that an actual hard drive manufacturer could make with an external drive (as opposed to a commodity peripherals manufacturer).
Obviously your geek fu is not strong...
When I started this job 7 months ago, I spent pretty much my first solid week refusing to do anything but coil cables, cable tie them and file them in stack & store boxes depending on category.
It does mean that IEC M-F would be in the same box as 13A plug IEC, but they are the only two sorts of cables in that box. Similarly the mini USB are in the same box as maxi USB (although I'm considering revising that).
A cable _pile_, though? Nah, I'm too much of a nerd (read: my OCD is too bad) for anything that messy :D
Far too organised. If I made finding a cable less of a challenge, every Tom, Dick and J Random Luser would be making off with all my "kettle leads." That's my excuse.
To be fair, mine is a suspended pile; there's so many of the things, anything other than "pile" or "heap" (but never "stack" as that sounds like you could just push a cable on or pop a cable off with a simple operation when, in reality, a big job breaks out) is doing the resultant mutant squid an injustice. It contains anything from old 100R twinax cables (that, thank Eris, I will never have to make up again) to eSATA multiports. Speaking of which, I really ought to check that rope that suspends them all...
*THUD* <muffled swearing/>
OK, *now* it's a pile ;o)
I just got one from Ebuyer. Very nice it is too. Even nicer with an EXT3 filesystem on it. :)
Oddly the power cable is a European style one, with just two round prongs on it. So that won't fit in a UK power socket. I just went back to Ebuyer to check what I'd bought, and it's been discontinued. That didn't last long, did it? Maybe they bought a batch destined for Europe?
The other end of the cable is a two hole 8-shaped connector, and being a fully badged up geek I had such a cable with a UK plug on it. So no big deal for me.
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