Samsung today announced that its new 3.5-inch external hard drive, STORY Station, will feature the industry’s first standby power consumption below a watt starting in November. The reduced standby power level easily meets requirements for the forthcoming European Union’s EuP (Energy Using Products) Directive for Standby Regulation, effective January 2010.

Samsung has lowered the standby power consumption by over 95 percent, to 0.09W from the conventional level of 2.5W, a move that will cut down on indirect CO2 emissions. Samsung’s introduction of the low standby power level is the first for any 3.5-inch external hard drive.

The reduced power level for standby mode was achieved by adopting a new circuit structure, which makes the drive non-operational when the power cable is connected and the USB port is not.

Samsung’s 3.5-inch STORY Station external hard drive line up is available globally in densities ranging from 500 gigabytes (GBs) to two terabytes (TBs) and features Samsung Auto Backup for ongoing data preservation, SecretZone™ software for personal data encryption and SafetyKey™ for password protection.

The lowered standby power feature will be adopted in all STORY Station drives shipped from early November 2009.

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