To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung SH-S203B. 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 SH-S203B supports everything.

The Samsung SH-S203B supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table and screenshots, the Samsung SH-S203B is a “Two Sheep Burner” but we note the Samsung SH-S203B also managed to read our Safedisc 2.90 test disc.

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).

The Samsung SH-S203B had no problems in creating our 100 minute CD-R test burn.

700MB (80 minute) over-burn test:

From the screenshot above, the Samsung SH-S203B reported a maximum overburn capacity of 83:28.04. We attempted to burn a disc slightly less than the reported maximum capacity. To be exact we setup a test burn of 82 minutes and 52 seconds.

The Samsung SH-S 203B had no problems in over-burning our 80 minute disc to 82 minutes and 52 seconds.

We then decided to see if the Samsung SH-S203B could read the overburned disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Samsung SH-S203B had no problems in reading our test 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 SH-S203B does not support overburning on this media type.

DVD-R over-burn test:

We will now try a DVD-R media.

Again the Samsung SH-S203B did not support overburning to the media type.

MINI DVD discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Samsung SH-S203B 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 SH-S203B 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 SH-S203B read our test MINI DVD-RW media without any problems.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Samsung SH-S203B 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 SH-S203B had no problems in reading our Video-CD disc. The reading speed is however locked at 16x.

This concludes our Samsung SH-S203B review. To read the conclusion, click on the link below....

DVD-RAM Read and write performance

Conclusion