Samsung Lightscribe Dvd Writer Drive 20X Sh-S203N Bebn Black Sata

List Price: $43.55 Discount Price: $49.95

Features:

• Device Type - DVD +/- RW
• Internal/External - Internal
• Interface Type - SATA
• LightScribe -- Yes
• Write / Read Data Transfer Rate:

Customer Reviews:

Great DVD Writer [Posted on 2008-09-02]
I bought this DVD Drive mainly so I could easily rip DVDs and burn them at my leisure. I definitely like the lightscribe capability and am looking into buying some media with lightscribe surfaces. I had no problems installing this in my desktop. It only has two interfaces on the back. Very simple. The two interfaces are SATA Power and SATA Data. You can't mess this up. After installing, it made a nice aesthetic addition to my tower. The black face is clean and the big button makes it easy to push it in the dark or with low light. The loading tray was very responsive. Hardware wise, has a decent weight and am very appreciative of the quality of the build.

So I installed the drive which required no pre-setup. I just plugged it into a free SATA port on my motherboard with no clear choice for which one. It goes into my "all the rest of my devices" category. I'm not worried about using this to boot up with, so my computer didn't need to find it at boot. It only sees my main hard drive, and my IDE DVD-Rom drive. So after booting up Windows, there was no additional setup needed. It gave me the prompt about "Windows has finished installing devices. You will need to restart. Would you like to do that now?"

I told it "No" because it always says that when finding a new USB Thumb drive or whatever, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. No problems there. I first put in a DVD from 2002. It read it no problem and I noticed that my drivers were dated from 2001. I had no connectivity to the internet at that time, so I didn't worry about updating it, but there's a feature on the CD that ships in the box that has a big button on the autorun program that takes you to samsungodd.com to update your firmware on your DVD Drive. Very useful feature if you ever need to make sure you have the latest and greatest firmware. I opened up DVD Decrypter and decided to rip my 2002 DVD onto my computer. I spent about a minute and noticed it got up to 2.9x read speed. I was disappointed, so I thought maybe it was the media. So I got a DVD from 2007 and popped it in there. Did the same with DVD Decrypter, and it started out at the same speed. I was still disappointed, but just before I thought I would just cancel it, I decided to time it as a baseline for the entire DVD. I watched the speed of the drive, and I was happy to see it keep climbing slowly. After a while, it got up to the max speed of 11.3x. I noticed it was slow at first, but when it hit a big portion of the DVD, it sped right up. I think it's also related to which location on the DVD it's reading. At the beginning it's slow because it's having to read in such a small circle. But when it goes around the middle and outside, it speeds up and can read it easier? Just my thought. Anyways, it made NO noticeable noise, but I didn't stick my head next to the computer. My computer is normally silent, but I admit there was an AC making a slight background hum. But I thought for sure I would start hearing it at 11x. I couldn't hear a thing. Very happy with the purchase and it also fixed my previous issue of lag when I would read discs or burn discs. My old drive is IDE though, so I'm sure that's where I went wrong :)

Overall, I didn't see the DVD drive read DVDs at 20x, but I'm sure that's in a lab with 100% of your necessary stuff including software made for speed. It got up to a decent 11.3x and ripped the entire DVD in 13 minutes. The speed varied throughout, but wouldn't drop below 9.0x after about 3 minutes of burning.

Very great DVD drive. I did my research and it paid off with this drive. Also can't wait to play around with the Lightscribe with this. The disc includes Nero 7 Essentials and a user guide.

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