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To round off this review we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung TS-H552B. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs and some special disc test.

Copy protected data discs:

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That is since the symbol 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 could be found here.

In the screenshot below take from CloneCD v5.0.4.2, we see the Samsung TS-H552B supports everything.

The Samsung TS-H552B 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-H552B is a 'Two Sheep Burner". 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)

And Celine Dion: A new day has come; protected with key2audio version 3.

Results:

The CD's was read at full speed without any problems.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Samsung TS-H552B, we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn 99 minutes.

The picture above shows us that the Samsung TS-H552B did not have any problems reading 99 minutes long CD's. The reading curve is very nice indeed. The speed at the end of the CD was 50.91x (The drive is certified to 48x on CD-R).

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