To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung SE-S184M. These tests are: “Sheep Test”, and some special disc tests.

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That’s because the logo of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. When looking at supported writers, you will notice that the feature list has sheep to indicate if a feature is supported or not. In this case we are interested in the writer’s ability to backup/write weak sectors. Also called: “Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns”.

• No sheep: Can’t backup any safedisc 2 versions without the help of software tricks
• 1 Sheep: Can backup safedisc 2 up to version 2.4x without software tricks
• 2 Sheep: Can backup safedisc 2, including version 2.5x
• 3 Sheep: Can write all possible weak sectors, few if any writers could do this.

One of our forum moderators Womble; has written a guide concerning the “Sheep Test” that can be and be found here.

In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD, we see the Samsung SE-S184M supports everything.

The Samsung SE-S184M supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Samsung SE-S184M is a “Two Sheep Burner”, in addition it was also able to complete our Safedisc 2.90 test.

Overburning:

900MB (99 minute) over-burn test:

For this test we used an Infiniti Professional Compax 99min/900mb CD-R. (Thanks to Medea International (UK) for providing the disc).

From the screenshot above, it was clear the Samsung SE-S184M would be able to write the 99 minute media at its full length. We then set up a test over-burn with Nero CD-Speed. We set the test at 99:29.25 to be exact and then attempted to write a test disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Samsung SE-S184M created our test disc. Now it was time to see if the drive could read the disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Samsung SE-S184M successfully read the disc.

DVD+R over-burn test:

We first tried to burn a DVD+R media.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Samsung SE-S184M does not support overburning on this media type.

DVD-R over-burn test:

We will now try a DVD-R media.

Again the Samsung SE-S184M did not support overburning to the media type.

MINI DVD discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Samsung SE-S184M is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB.

The Memorex media is made by CMC Magnetics.  Thanks to Memorex Europe for sending us this media.

The Samsung SE-S184M had no problems in writing our test MINI DVD-RW disc. Now let’s find out if the drive can read the disc.

The Samsung SE-S184M read our test MINI DVD-RW media without any problems.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Samsung SE-S184M would read a Video-CD, for this test we created a Video-CD with Nero Burning ROM 7, and used NERO CD-DVD Speed to read the disc back. Below is our result:

The Samsung SE-S184M had no problems in reading our Video-CD disc, although the read speed was locked at 16x.

This concludes our Samsung SE-S184M review. To read the conclusion, click on the link below....

LightScribe

Conclusion