detail information

What's inside the box?

On this page we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with and take a look at the drive and it's techniques.

Here is the box that contains the drive:

The box is not very large and is pretty nice looking. The '2Mb + Extra 6Mb buffer" stamp will for sure attract some hardware enthusiasts. It's also made clear by the box; this drive supports Multi read and should read all types of CD and DVD discs.

But a nice box is not enough, there have to be something inside it, so we opened the box and took out the content of it:

As we could see the package is pretty complete, to be sure that nothing is left out we list the content of the box below:

Box content:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Setup Guide
⋅         IDE Cable
⋅         Audio Cable
⋅         4 screws
⋅         Nero writing software installation CD
⋅         PowerDVD DVD Video player installation CD.
⋅         Samsung Manual CD.

A pretty good retail package, the only thing we are missing is preferably an empty CD-R disc and empty CD-RW disc as well as a printed manual.

Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself:

The Samsung have a front that set it aside from other drives. You may like it or hate it, but when we got used to it it's actually pretty nice in our opinion. The eject button is transparent with a LED(Light Emitting Diode) behind which flashes while writing, a pretty nice effect.

As we could see out from the sticker on the drive, our drive was manufactured in April 2003 at a factory in the Philippines. The model number is also clearly visible.

On the back of the drive there is the usual connectors, from the left there is: digital audio connector, analogue audio connector, pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master, IDE connector and power connector.

Another comment on the drive is that it's very light compared to other drives. So if you care about weight this drive should be considered.

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and fired up Nero Info Tool to get an idea of which features this drive supports:

While the drive came shipped with firmware T802 we immediately updated the drive to the latest version available, version T806. We find it a bit strange that Nero CD-Speed is unable to detect that it's able to read DVD+R/RW discs. But it for sure supports reading these discs, as we will see later in this review. The large 8Mb buffer is definitively a plus as well, and as we see it supports everything else, including Mount Rainier.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM: 

We can't really find anything to complain about here as it supports everything and have a nice 8Mb buffer.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the Samsung SM-352B:

CD-Recordable:

The drive uses CAV(Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its maximum speed, while the specifications states it should write at 52X, it do not really reach 52X but ends up on 51.79X, this gives an average speed of 39.33X.

CD-ReWritable:

As we could see the drive uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 24X for Ultra speed CD-RW, this gives an average speed of 23,08X. Compared to other drives this is nothing to be ashamed about.

Included software:

Now it's time to look at the included software, and comment it if needed. Notice that we may not use the included software in our performance testing part of the review.

PowerDVD:

The drive includes Cyberlink's PowerDVD Media player to play DVD and VCD movies. PowerDVD is a good and widely used software DVD-player, so Samsung have done a wise choice when selecting to include PowerDVD with the drive.

Nero Burning ROM v5.5:

Samsung opted for the full version of Nero burning ROM version 5.5 to be included with their drive. Also a wise decision as Nero is one of our preferred writing programs due to its many advanced functions along with an easy to use interface.

Samsung manual CD:

We did also take a look at the manual CD that Samsung included:

This is the first autorun menu that appeared, we selected Europe that brought up next menu:

There are quite many languages to select from, but we did choose the English version of course, which brought up the following html manual:

We checked out the manual for a while and the overall feeling is quite good, we like the way Samsung made the manual.

All in all the software collection is quite complete and features most programs that could be useful in combination with your newly bought Combo drive.

Features and techniques:

There is not many special techniques with this drive, we were even unable to find any information on how Samsungs buffer under run protection works.

  Super Link is the Buffer under run Prevention mechanism of the Samsung SM-352B drive. It stops the recording short time before the buffer is totally emptied and then continue to write at the same point on the CD when the buffer fills up again. If the recording stops due to a buffer under run there will be a tiny gap on the CD between where it stopped recording and where it started recording again, but this gap is so small that it's easily corrected by all drives error correction functions.

Mount Rainier:

In the Nero Burning Rom screenshot we saw that the Samsung SM-352B supports the Mount Rainier format. Mount Rainier enables native operating system support of data storage on CD-ReWriteable discs. This makes the technology far easier to use and allows the replacement of the floppy. Key features include:

⋅         Defect management by the drive itself
⋅         Logical write-addressing at 2k
⋅         Background formatting
⋅         Command set implementation
⋅         Compatibility and standards-compliance

For more information you can visit www.mt-rainier.org.

Now that we have finished examining the drive bundle and features it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…