Customer Reviews

Samsung M3 1TB USB 3.0 Slimline Portable Hard Drive - Black

Had the 1TB for a few weeks now and I'm very impressed , the image doesn't do the drive justice - it's a BLACK chequered and textured finish to the top, piano black around the sides and a Matt Black Durable underside with 4 rubber feet (These little rubber feet/touch pads are a great idea as its stops the drive clattering on the desk and sliding around ). In the box is a USB 3.0 micro cable (The drive and cable are fully backwards compatible with USB 2.0 which I'm currently using )a quick start guide and the warranty document (3 Years ) - on the drive there is security and back up software which i have yet to use but helpful if you don't have any.

So far it's done its job perfectly and I'm very impressed - recommended purchase 100%

Yup it works just fine... Had every game transferred across quickly and it works with no problems... Happy times.. order it with confidence.

This product is rubbish. I had one and it worked for about 2 weeks, then stopped opening on any computer. Amazon replaced it, then the second one broke after about 6 weeks. It had been kept in a case and only used at home and by me at work. Again no computer recognised it. I tried ringing samsung UK and they weren't interested as its not their product(?) I even went to the samsung shop but even they couldn't help. I eventually rang someone (in the us) who said they'd send me an envelope to send it back. No envelope arrived and I'm still stuck with a broken product. It has a useless 3 year guarantee as no one will help!

I bought this to connect to my home network and allow me to backup both a Mountain Lion Mac and a Windows 7 PC. Although this drive is advertised as working with both operating systems I was a little disappointed to find that the drive only comes with the Windows compatible software installed. Even worse, when I followed the official links to download the Mac software I found it relied on a piece of software made by google that was no longer available. As such this drive will not work straight out of the box with a Mac operating system.
In the end I reformatted the drive using Disk Utility on the Mac, wiping all of the Samsung software off the drive. This means I have lost some of their security options, which some people may want if they are using this as a portable hard drive and are worried about loosing the disk at some point. For me though I was happy that the security of my network hub would suffice and was easily able to plug the drive into the USB and have both Mac and Windows machines read and write to the drive.
The product is otherwise great. It is tiny, it doesn't seem to get too hot and doesn't whirr or click in any noticeable way. For the money I would definitely recommend it, and I particularly like that it draws its power through the USB cable so there is only one thing to plug in.

I've had this model for less than a year and I was very careful with it. I use PC. It suddenly does not appear on the computer when I plug in USB. Volume is not booting, so the data cannot be accessed. Disk Utility will not find the drive. The same result on other computers. I've done more research and found that many others have had this problem with it. Samsung 1TB M3 Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Black - HX-M101TCB/G
I hope I can be refuned.

This is an excellent product about the size of a packet of 20 cigarettes but about 1/2 the thickness -say about 1 cm thick.
It comes complete with a short usb cable approx 400 mm long wich is just ideal to place the product flat down on its 4 small rubber feet on a hard surface when it is operating. (since it is effectively a small disc drive running - which is extremely quite & you can feel it spinning if you place your finger on the top of the unit when it is operating. It also has a small blue LED to let you know it is recieving power and this flashes when transferring data. It seems to operate very efficiently from my Dell desktop with a usb 2 port and operating windows 7.Because I just wanted to back up all the files on my computer ie: My docs, My picture, My videos & My music I did not bother to use the supplied software, just simply attached the usb supplied (to itself)then plugged it in to my computers usb port. It then went through the intalling software and the message 'ready to use' popped up after 30 secs or so.
I then simply copied and pasted all the above folders by simply right clicking on each folder in 'C' drive then right clicking on the Samsung 'E' drive and pasting using windows explorer tool. Very, very easy - as per the pdf instruction files which are available to view if you open the drive and simply double click on the pdf instruction manual (**WHICH YOU SHOULD DO** before using it!!)The quick start paper guide simply tells you how to plug it in as above to get going with it.
It copied all the files very rapidly indeed, at approx 1 GB per minute I would say when I timed it as a rough guide.
All in all an excellent piece of kit, with my Dell computer backed up in about an hour (50 GB)!!
Then simply right click on the task bar at the bottom and eject the device - only disconnecting when it is safe to do so as per the instruction manual. It has got auto back up features and separated pieces of drive such as a private section, I guess with a passcode to set up and other sections to split the drive if you require them but you need to run the software supplied separately by simply clicking on the auto run feature for this software, but i did not bother as its too easy and quick just to simply copy and paste across and hey presto your computer is backed up with no effort at all.
Hope this review helps you decide when you a purchasing a portable drive but I could definatley recommend you buying this 500 GB M3 portable hard drive as it seems excellent and very easy to use!

This drive comes in nice retail packaging, the manual and warranty details are hidden inside a black spacer box behind the drive which I didn't immediately realise. The drive looks really nice, it's a matt black checkerboard effect. It's only a little larger than the 2.5 inch drive it contains. It also comes with a USB 3 notched cable. (It will of course work with USB1 or 2).

One word of warning, as this drive is formatted with NTFS, it will not work out of the box with OSX - no matter what the manual says! It will be read only unless you erase the drive (Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility then choose the Samsung drive and erase). It's not a biggie, but worth mentioning for any Mac users.

The drive comes with the Samsung drive manager software, manuals, and secure unlock/portable secret zone software already on it. As you may expect, this software is designed for windows, and once installed requires a reboot.

The drive manager software has secret zone, auto backup, diagnostics and disk management and it's incredibly easy to use and I created a secure partition very quickly.
However, once it created the partition the software crashed! Everything was okay and I could still use the drive but it was a little disconcerting. The rest of the functions are already present in all versions of Windows, so it was just the convenience of having them in one place.

In actual use the drive is great - I did a backup of my music library over the network and it copied 8644 files totalling 55Gb in 1 hour and 12 minutes. This is quite respectable, as I was using a Windows 7 machine running in a parallels desktop from OSX via USB2. I don't have any USB3 hardware to try it on (yet!) but the copy speeds should be at least 5 or 6 times quicker (USB3 is rated as 10x quicker in theory)

***UPDATE copying an 8gb file from the drive on USB2 took about 9 minutes, using USB3 was less than 60 seconds. Very, very impressed with the speed increase! UPDATE***

From OSX I then erased the drive and used as a time machine backup - again this did the job fine and without any fuss.

There is no heat generated from the drive and there is the smallest amount of noise possible, in a quiet room my typing is louder than the noise output of the drive. You can hear it if the room is silent but only just.

I can't rate the hardware highly enough. It's robust, quiet and reliable. The only let down is the software - I chose not to use this and was very happy with the drive. The software is the only reason it's not a 5 star review.

Recommended

I bought this September 2012. It has been used a few times for backups and last night it failed. Very frustrating as I have lost all previous backups and it will not reformat. Surprised because I expected better from Samsung.

I Used this drive for my Samsung smart TV so that I can enable the built in VCR
Type feature for recording TV programs. As soon as I plugged the drive in it recognised it straight away and there is no power lead to worry about, just plug and play. The 500 gig of memory is more then enough for this task too. The only thing I noticed was the TV formats the drive differently from windows so you can't for instance record a TV program then transfer it to your PC (windows 7) for further editing. But as far as the drive in use for its intention on my Smart TV its perfect. I do have other of these drives exacttly the same brand and model only 1TB and that works perfect with windows 7 just plug and play and away it pops up ready for use.

I found this drive can handle HD recordings very smoothly indeed with no drop outs at all when watching films.

Another thing I like about these are they are very very small drives that can fit inside your coat pocket no problem and very thin about the size of a small diary or notebook, extremely lightweight so you wouldn't notice it either. You also get the USB cable with it but its only a 48cm in length so you might need an extention for some uses, its great for just plugging into laptops though. Great job Samsung.

Within 4 months of use, the cable connection at the hard drive has become loose and unreliable, for both USB2.0 and USB3.0 cables. I have had many Samsung HDDs before and am disappointed by the quality of the cable connection. The most annoying fact is it is very hard to open the case to fix this with a replacement connection. I have only used this at home and am disappointed with the quality of the connector, especially as this is likely to be used repeatedly for a 'portable' hard drive.

Step it up Samsung, I chose this over a seagate (same drive internally) due to what I hoped was superior external build quality :(