Samsung’s CD ReWriter

The latest CD-ReWriter from Samsung, SW-216, has a write speed of 16x, rewrite speed of 10x and a read speed of 32x. In terms of its write and rewrite speeds it’s definitely one the fastest drives. Like most CD-RWs, this also has an IDE interface. You’ll have to be careful about the jumper settings though, if you have other devices already installed on your IDE cable. Its front panel has a headphone jack, and a wheel volume control so you’ll be able to hear your audio CDs, provided you connect the drive to your soundcard through an audio cable. However, it does not have any navigation buttons or the play button, which means you’ll have to play your audio CDs through some application. The drive has a 2 MB cache buffer to store data before it’s burnt.

We did a few tests on this drive to see how well it performs. The drive came with Nero5 for burning CDs and InCD for using CD-RW disks. The first test was a direct burn test, in which we burnt 650 MB worth of data at 16x speed, from the hard drive on to a CD-R and noted the time taken. The drive took just 5 min 20 sec, which is the fastest time we’ve ever got, beating the 5 min 30 sec of the Asus Drive (page 110, PCQuest November 2001), which also had 16x write speeds. Next we burnt a 650 MB image, which it completed, in an equally fast time of just over 5 min. For the ReWrite tests, we performed a full format on a CD-RW disk, which took 17 min. This was around 3 min behind the Asus drive, but nevertheless is a very good time. Once formatted a CD-RW disk can be used as another drive attached to your system, so you can transfer files to and from the CD-RW. So, we transferred 100 MB worth of data from CD-RW to the hard drive, to check for throughputs.

This it finished in just 52 sec, giving it an average throughput of 1.92 MBps, again beating the 1.29 MBps of the ASUS drive.

Overall, on the performance front this drive fared exceptionally well

The price is where the drive really steals the show. The Asus drive was priced at

Rs 11,500 whereas this one costs just Rs 6,500. As a part of the package you also get one CD-R and a CD-RW disk to get started.

Sachin Makhija at PCQLabs