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by Samsung
Specifications
This review was based upon the bulk or OEM version of the Samsung SM-348B drive with the 2MB buffer. The retail version has a larger 8MB buffer and should perform better at CD recording than the one reviewed. CD-Speeds Data reading speed results are done from standard pressed data CD (~650MB) and an 80-minute standard pressed audio CD using Nero CDSpeed 1.02. Recording speeds are based upon a recording done from a standard sized 650 MB CD image file stored on the hard drive recorded to a blank CD-R media from Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5. The SM-348B drive is rated at 48x maximum speeds when reading data CDs. It uses the industry standard CAV (constant angular velocity) method of reading the disc. This means that the inside tracks of the CD will be read at a slower rate than the outer rim of the CD. Nero's CDSpeed benchmark tests the speed of the drive across the whole portion of the disk to generate its results. Drive reading speeds are as follows:
Based on the results, the drive performs very close to its rated maximum and its average drive performance is excellent. Access time performance of the drive scored very well compared to its specifications. It is rated at 110 ms for CD access rates. During testing, the random score result was 99 ms for random access and 1/3 stroke scored 108 ms just under the specification. The full stroke of the drive head from inner to outer tracks takes 180 ms which is still very respectable. CPU usage on the drive was very minimal during playback of the pressed data CDs. The maximum CPU usage during testing of CD playback was 4% of the CPU. Recording speeds were very impressive for the 48x rated speed. It took the drive only 2 minutes and 26 seconds to record the 650MB CD image in Easy CD Creator. This is the full time to write the data and build the table of contents. This is very close to the speeds that one will see from the latest 52x CD-RW drives. Digital Audio Extraction is a bit slow on this drive at only 10x speed. This means that it will take longer than most drives for ripping CD audio to MP3 format, but the drive is able to produce an accurate data stream without any skipping in the ripped audio tracks. DVD-Rom Speeds The SM-348B is a combo drive that includes the capability to read DVD-ROM and DVD movies in addition to CD media. Samsung rates the drive at 16x speed when reading data from DVD media. Once again Nero's CDSpeed v 1.02 was used to record the speeds across the length of a pressed DVD movie disc to find the actual speeds
Since the DVD movie being used for the test did not take up the full data portion of a single layer of the disc, the final recording speed is lower than its maximum potential. If the disc had included a full single layer data portion, the drive would have been very close to its rated speed. Seek times for the drive on DVD-ROM data was much better than the rated specifications. The numbers were almost identical to the CD data times with 97ms random, 109ms 1/3 and 176 full stroke. The drive is rated at a 130ms access time, so the drive performs above its rated specification for DVD media. CPU usage for DVD drives is very poor compared to that of CD media. The primary cause for this is the huge increase in the amount of data encoded in the data stream compared to that of CD-media. DVD technology is a less mature than CD technology. As a result, the drive showed 6% CPU utilization at standard 1x speeds used for movie playback, but at full reading speed of 16x the drive monopolized the CPU at 100%. Let's hope the drive manufacturers correct this in the future as this is problematic with all DVD based drives currently. Software The drive comes packaged with CyberLink's PowerDVD software based DVD player and Roxio's Easy CD Creator Standard version with DirectCD 5.1. This is a good selection of software but it fails to include any good audio software suites that can allow the user to rip and store catalogs of music on their systems. The CyberLink PowerDVD installed quickly and after calibrating itself to the hard in the computer system allowed for easy playback of DVD movies with a smooth frame rate. The Roxio EasyCD 5 Standard is a limited version of the Platinum addition of the CD recording suite. Included in this package is the CD Creator for making music or data CDs, CD Copier to make limited backups of existing CDs, and a Sound Stream application to rip music from the CD to the hard drive. While it does allow for the creation of MP3 files and generation of audio music CDs, it lacks any true music cataloging on the computer system which is a feature anyone into music would appreciate. It also includes Direct CD 5.1 to allow the drive to use CD-RW drives just like a hard drive. Conclusions Its hard not to recommend the Samsung SM-348B drive to anyone looking for a new CD-RW drive. It is also one of the few drives that also has the added bonus of being able to read and playback DVD discs as well. This is a godsend for anyone looking to build a small form factor computer system that only has a single 5.25" drive bay. The performance is very close to the latest 52x CD-RW drives and the price is at or just above competing non-combo drives. Samsung has built a solid high performance combo drive.
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