High spec, good price . Very easy and quick to fit
Disadvantages:
None found so far .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
I bought this as a direct replacement for my existing drive which died a death a couple of weeks ago and I got it from an ebay seller, new, for a few pence short of £40 and that includes the postage.
What specs do we have for this model? Basically, it will burn DVD's (+ and -, recordable and rewritable) as well as CD-R and CD-RW. It reads all of those formats too, plus DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, CD Audio, Video-CD, CD_I, Cd-EXTRA, Photo CD, CD-Text and CD-ROM but it will NOT handle DVD-RAM discs. For CD-R's and CD-RW's the write speed is 48X and 32X respectivly. For DVD-/+R's it is 16X and for DVD+RW and DVDR-RW it is 8X and 6X respectively. And like an increasing number of new drives it will also burn and read the large capacity dual layer discs. It has a 2MB sized buffer, great for preventing buffer underrun. As a nice (but not essential for some people) extra, it also has Lightscribe facilty. This means that with the right labelling software and some Lightscribe compatible blank discs, it can laser etch a label in glorious monochrome! Whoo-hoo!
The retail box arrived in all it's blue and yellow glory and on opening it had the well-packed drive itself, a disc with the bundled Nero suite and a manual, (though no Windows utilities or drivers, but I didn't need those anyway), an internal ribbon cable for connecting it to the mobo (again, not needed), a cable to connect the drive to the soundcard(ditto), four screws and also, in a nice touch, spare bezels in black and silver, to match your case if those are your colours. Mostly all present and correct then.
Fitting the drive into the usual standard 5.25" drive bay was a doddle, as it was merely a matter of taking the sides off my PC case, disconnecting the old drive cables, removing the screws, sliding it out and then do the reverse with the new one, making sure first that the jumper on the new was set to master (like the old). Took me about five minutes, but then again, I've been fiddling with stuff like this for years. If you are not familiar with doing this sort of conversion, then it might better to get to get a friend to do it for you.
So, I plugged my PC back together, fired up the power and the PC recognised the new drive straight away. No worries! (I'm using Windows XP, btw). I didn't install the Nero suite at first because I much prefer the Roxio burning software I have on there already. This really put the new drive through it's paces and I have to say that this is possibly the fastest DVD/CD burner I have ever had in any of my PC's. It soon makes short work of copying CD's and copying a DVD I'd recorded on my domestic DVD Recorder wasn't a slouch either. Equally, it will handle and burn stuff already on my hard drive pretty fast too. So far, I've had no coasters or any other problem. And the Lightscribe facilty is pretty good too, although it takes around 25 mins to draw a label on the 'best' setting, using Sure Thing Label Maker, So yep, I'm well please with the thing.
As a sort of postscript, about a week later, I installed the Nero suite and other bundled software and fiddled about with it for a few days. I still don't like the basic Nero burning suite, but a handy little program on there was the Live Update of the firmware facilty, where you can go online, and download the latest frimware update, direct from Samsung's website and sit back while it upgrades automatically (shades of the recent Doctor Who story there!) . It's a piece of cake and takes just two or three minutes. Much better and safer than the old way of making a boot disc, booting from that etc, etc.
As you can tell, I'm enthusiatic about this excellent piece of kit. It is a good balance between cost and quality and is great as a direct replacement. I also think would be excellent as a second drive (don't forget to change the jumper to 'slave' in that case) or for someone building a new PC from scratch.
Of course, if you can get hold of it as a 'brown box'/OEM piece of kit, then more to the better. But you didn't hear me say that, Ok?
More details
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Design
Good
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
Speed
Very fast
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