Date: August 23rd, 2002
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Samsung Canada
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PRODUCT PICTORIALS

The burner comes with everything, screws for installing the writer, a IDE data cable to connect it to your motherboard, an audio cable to connect to your motherboard in order for you to play audio CD's through your computer, software (easy cd-creator), and the actual drive itself.

As with any 5 1/4" optical drive, their looks are not that different. Samsung's version is a little different with it's slightly rounded construction which gives it a unique look.

PRODUCT TESTING

My test rig contains:

- Shuttle AK 31 v2.0
- Duron 700
- 256megs of Samsung Pc2700 DDR
- 30gig ATA-100 HardDrive
- ATI All-in-Wonder 128meg 8500
- *Review* Samsung SW-232 32x Burner
- Windows XP Pro

All testing was run using Nero Burning Rom and its associated tools Nero CD-Speed. Also, testing was undertaken using the Cd-rom benchmark from SiSoft Sandra 2002.

First Benchmark will be the Nero Cd-Speed benchmark reading a Data CD and the pure CD-ROM capabilities.

Transfer rates were rather continuous with no errors and a maximum read of 33.35x. It did not seem to have a high average transfer rate, but this in my mind is due to probably a inferior CPU and motherboard and not due to the drive itself.

Second Benchmark will be the Nero Cd-Speed benchmark reading an Audio CD and the pure CD-ROM capabilities.

As with the data read, the audio read was pretty well exactly the same other than the CPU usage at 8x which seems to be a little higher when reading audio information. Why is that? No idea? If you know, email me HERE.

With a score of 2089kb/sec, it's score reflects its cd-rom speed of 40x and is benchmarking pretty well where is should be for its speed.

Now, all these benchmarks and numbers flying around are nice, but what does it really mean? Well, in my mind, the most important things are one, how fast does it burn a full CD and two, does it have any errors? Well, a full CD burn takes approximately 4 minutes flat and due to the buffer-underrun technology, it does it error free.

PRODUCT CONCLUSIONS & AFTERTHOUGHTS


Seeing that this has been the premiere optical drive review for Tweaknews.net, the review of this Samsung burner is the perfect introduction. This drive does its job well, it does it fast, and it does it error-free. This is all most people need in a drive. Now, if you are impatient and are in need of a faster burn, I would recommend maybe going for the 40X burner Samsung manufacturers. But all in all, I think this would be a great overall upgrade for your computer. Next optical drive review will be on the DVD-Rom/CD-RW combo drive from Plextor.

Pro's:

- Great Quality
- Fast Burner (4 minute burn)
- Error Free burning with Justlink Technology
- Reasonably Priced
- Comes with bundled software.

Con's:

- Not the fastest Burner out there [due to my tardiness with this review =(]
- Would rather have seen Nero Burning Rom bundled with the burner instead of the Easy CD-creator.

If you have any comments on the review, please contact me HERE .