Samsung Electronics has launched a new line-up of 3.5-inch external hard drives Story Station Plus, which it claims to feature an external serial ATA (eSATA) interface to allow faster data transfer. The 3.0-gigabit per second (Gbps) drives are available in up to 2-terabyte (TB) densities.
The company claims that the addition of the eSATA interface raises the data transfer speed of the Story Station Plus series by more than six-fold when compared with models using a USB 2.0 interface. Users can utilise either the 480 megabit per second (Mbps) USB 2.0 or the 3.0Gbps eSATA interface.
According to Samsung, the Story Station Plus line-up will also feature the company’s low standby power design that reduces the standby power by 96% to 0.1 watts (W) from the conventional 2.5W. The reduced standby power level meets requirements for the forthcoming European Union EuP (Energy Using Products) Directive for Standby Regulation, effective January 2010.
The company said that the new 3.5-inch Story Station Plus external hard drive is available in densities ranging from 1TB to 2TB. It comes with an aluminum outer casing that not only provides a chic design but contributes to effective heat dispersion. In addition, the new series of hard drives feature Samsung Auto Backup for ongoing data preservation, SecretZone software for personal data encryption and SafetyKey for password protection.
H S Lee, vice president of storage marketing at Samsung Electronics, said: “Samsung new line of high-density solutions with the eSATA interface give users the speed they need for demanding tasks like photo and video editing, plus safely storing multimedia content libraries. The 2TB density Story Station Plus drive can store the data equivalent of 500,000 MP3 music files, 560,000 digital photo images, or 880 hours of high resolution video.”
The Story Station Plus drives will be available globally by the end of November 2009. It comes with a three-year limited warranty and the 2TB version has a $299 MSRP.
