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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung TS-E522U. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs and some special disc tests.

Copy protected data discs:

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
• 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 could be found here.

In the screenshot below take from CloneCD v5.1.0.0, we see the Samsung TS-E552U supports everything.

The Samsung TS-E552U supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data. Drive used to verify that the tests works are JLMS XJ-HD166S. Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

As we can read from the table the Samsung TS-E522U is a 'Two Sheep Burner" and also capable to burn copies of Safedisc v2.90. But it failed to write the Sheep3 tests.

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:

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

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

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

Results:

The Samsung TS-E552U had no problem to detect and rip the three protected audio CD's at full speed.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Samsung TS-E552U, we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn disc larger then 99/100 minutes.

The picture above shows us that the Samsung TS-E552U did not have any problems reading 99 minutes long CD's. The reading curve is very nice indeed and it even went over the 51X mark.

Power consumption:

We were wondering how much the power consumption is for this external drive so we did some tests/measurements with a Digital energy meter:

Off mode (external drive switched in OFF/standby mode)

On mode (external drive switched in ON mode)

Operation mode

Now, that concludes our Samsung TS-E552U review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…