Samsung Combo Drive

This internal IDE combo drive with 48x Read/Write, 24x Re-Write and 16x DVD Read speeds, is a great buy for its price
and performance. We tested it on Imation 48x CD-R and Ritek 10x CD-RW media (due to non-availability of faster media).

The drive has upgradable firmware, and the performance improved in some areas when we did. Its performance was comparable to contemporary drives like the Iomega 48x reviewed in the November 2002 issue. It took just 2:50 secs to burn 650 MB data from the hard drive and 3:45 secs from a CD. After the firmware update, the latter improved to 2:50. It took 3:38 secs for a 74 min audio CD from WAV files, which improved to 3:14 secs after the update. A direct audio CD-CD copy took longer than other results at 4:56 secs, and the timings didn’t improve even after the upgrade. The drive also handled CD-RW media pretty well taking 11:13 secs for a complete format, almost two mins faster than the Iomega 48x. Formatted capacity was average at 534 MB. Data throughputs with the CDRW were a little slow at 0.6 MBps, but interestingly this improved to 1.2 MBps when we moved from Win2000 Prof to XP. On the DVD front, it showed a maximum reading of 11x, lower than its
rated 16x.

Anoop Mangla