Samsung Germany, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers was kind enough to send us their latest external DVD burner for review - the Samsung SE-W164C.  This DVD burner features pretty much the same specifications as their internal model, the SH-W162C, but with the exception that this is an external drive.  This drive connects via USB2 and can operate in either a horizontal or vertical position with its included mounting stand.  It also features air vents and a grooved front door design to protect the user from a disc rupture.  The drive's software bundle consists of Nero Express 6 OEM suite and a firmware live update utility.  Finally, its live firmware update feature makes it very user-friendly to load the latest firmware as the utility downloads the latest firmware as well as installs it.

Both European reviewers Jan and Dee-27 have worked together on this review and have just published their in-depth hardware review, which covers reading, writing and disc quality tests of a wide range of brand of media as well as many advanced tests such as how it copes with copy protected media, 99 minute CD-Rs, etc.

Specifications:

As usual, this review covers in-depth read and write tests on a wide range of brands consisting of both DVD plus and minus writable, rewritable and dual/double layer media as well as CD writable and rewritable media.  After each disc is written, a Disc Quality test is performed to show a PI/PIF graph of how well each disc performs.

To find out how this drive performs, including further specifications and details, please check out the in-depth review here.  Once you have a look over the review, feel free to comment or ask further questions about the drive or review on this forum thread.