detail information

To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung SH-W162C. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs and some special disc tests.

The 'Sheep Test":

 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 found here.

In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD, we see the Samsung SH-W162C supports everything.

The Samsung SH-W162C 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 SH-W162C is a 'Two Sheep Burner", in addition it also managed to copy the Safedisc V2.90 test. It could not manage the Sheep3 test though.

Copy protected Audio:

For our protected audio test, we used the Exact Audio Copy program. We inserted the protected audio discs and if the drive was able to recognize the disc we tried to extract the music tracks to the hard drive. First let us look at the discs we had available for this test: 

Celine Dion: A New Day Has Come; protected with key2audio version 3.

Herbert Gé¶nemeyer: Mensch - This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200.0.4 .3(build 12b)

And Michelle: Leben!; protected with Cactus Datashield 200.5.1.91 - 5.10.090.

Results:

From our 'copy protected audio disc" tests, we would have to conclude the Samsung SH-W162C is a good drive for ripping protected audio CD's.

Overburning:

To test the over-burning capabilities of the Samsung, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can over-burn disc larger then 90 minutes.

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-W162C reported an over-burn capacity of 96 Minutes and 36 Seconds.

As we can see the Samsung SH-W162C had no problems reading 99 minutes CD-R.

Mini DVD-R/RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Samsung SH-W162C is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-R/RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB. But let us take a look at the media first:

The media is made by Ritek (Made in Taiwan).  Thanks to Conrexx Technology B.V. (The Netherlands) for sending us this media.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-RW : RITEKW01]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & Book Type :       [DVD-RW] - [DVD-RW]
Manufacturer Name :      [Ritek Corp.]
Manufacturer ID :        [RITEKW01]
Blank Disc Capacity :    [714,544 Sectors = 1.46 GB (1.36 GB)]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Media Code'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'Media Code'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 0Eh - Pre-Recorded Information In Lead-In
0000 : 01 40 f6 ff 21 8d 21 00  02 0d 06 07 88 65 0d 00   .@..!.!......e..
0010 : 03 52 49 54 45 4b 57 00  04 30 31 00 00 00 00 00   .RITEKW..01.....
0020 : 05 00 88 00 00 00 00 00  06 11 09 05 60 07 10 00   ............`...
0030 : 07 00 00 00 88 00 00 00                            ........       
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Samsung SH-W162C had no problems in writing the Traxdata Mini DVD-RW disc.

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-RW : CMCW02]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & Book Type :       [DVD-RW] - [DVD-RW]
Manufacturer Name :      [CMC Magnetics Corp.]
Manufacturer ID :        [CMCW02]
Blank Disc Capacity :    [716,800 Sectors = 1.47 GB (1.37 GiB)]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Media Code'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'Media Code'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 0Eh - Pre-Recorded Information In Lead-In
0000 : 01 40 f6 ff 21 00 21 00  02 0f 05 06 88 75 0d 00   .@..!.!......u..
0010 : 03 43 4d 43 57 30 32 00  04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   .CMCW02.........
0020 : 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  06 0f 0c 04 60 08 10 00   ............`...
0030 : 07 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................
0040 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................
0050 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00   ................
0060 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00                     ..........    
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Once again, the Samsung SH-W162C had no problems to writing the Memorex Mini DVD-RW disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Samsung SH-W162C would read a Video-CD, for this test we created a Video-CD with Nero Burning ROM 6, and used NERO CD-DVD Speed to read the disc back. Below is our result:

As we can see the Samsung SH-W162C is locked at 16x when reading a VCD.

This concludes our Samsung SH-W162C review, lets head on to the last page to read our conclusion…