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1 2 3 NextJanuary 23, 2006 by Devon
Cooke
The day of the Octopus PC has arrived! High speed interfaces such as Firewire
and USB 2.0 have made it possible for all kinds of components
to become portable, including hard drives and optical drives. All
these devices use a single wire to connect to the PC at the center;
hence, the Octopus PC. The Samsung Writemaster adds yet another tentacle to
the Octopus PC: It's an external DVD burner with all the bells and whistles
of a conventional internal model.
In the case of hard drives, it's fairly obvious why you'd want it to be portable:
Large amounts of data can be moved between computers in this way. But, optical
drives do not need to be portable to have this advantage: The discs they use
are already portable. So, why have a portable optical drive?
Portable optical drives are probably most useful to small or medium sized businesses
with many workstations that only rarely need to read or write an optical disk.
So, instead of putting a drive in every system (a significant expense even for
a small number of systems), a much smaller number of external drives can be
shared between all the systems. I can attest to this personally: There are at least
a dozen systems lying around SPCR in various states of (dis)assembly, and
none of them require an optical disk after Windows and some basic drivers are
installed. The plug-and-play portability of an external drive is invaluable
when working with multiple systems at once.
For a home user with just one or two computers, portability isn't so useful
because there's nowhere to move the drive to. Besides, in a personal machine,
the optical drive often sees quite a bit of use, so it's worth it to have one
in every computer. On the other hand, an external drive is a very convenient
way to add DVD burning to a laptop.
A smallish retail box holds the necessities but no extras.
The front of the box lists a long string of numbers the proudly boast the data
speeds that the Writemaster can handle, but these aren't terribly interesting
in themselves. The same string of numbers can be found on just about every other
contemporary drive. Besides, like the power ratings on power supplies, these
numbers refer to the peak transfer rates, which are rarely reached
except under special circumstances. Furthermore, the numbers aren't even calculated
in the same way, which explains why 16x burns are rarely much faster than 8x
burns.
Lots of meaningless numbers...
The Writemaster comes with the basic essentials needed to run the drive, but
not too many extras:
- DVD±R/RW Drive
- Setup Guide
- Application Software & User Manual CD
- AC Adapter
- USB Cable (~1m long)
- Vertical Stand
The "Application Software" is an OEM version of Nero's standard
burning suite, which does everything ? if you feel like figuring it out.
For casual home users, this is an advantage; many different tasks are centralized
under a single beginner-friendly user interface. For enthusiast users, however,
only the burning software itself is really useful; the rest is mostly
bloatware ? who needs yet another media / DVD player anyway? The only exceptions
are the collection of tools in the "Nero Toolkit", which consist of
tools for examining and tweaking the drive itself.
The most useful of these is a little program called DriveSpeed, that allows
the maximum read/write speed of the drive to be controlled. Most SPCR regulars
are already familiar with this utility, as it is one of the few proven methods
of dealing with optical drive noise.
SPECIFICATIONS
The specifications for the Writemaster are typical of the current drives on
the market: As many disc formats as possible are supported, as is buffer underrun
protection. Windows identifies the drive as an SH-W162C — the internal
equivalent of the SE-W164C.
|
|
|
Model
|
SE-W164C
|
|
Max Data Transfer Rate
|
Media Type |
Write |
Read |
| DVD+R |
16X (21.6MB/sec) |
12X (16.2MB/sec) |
| DVD+R DL |
5X (6.75MB/sec) |
8X (10.8MB/sec) |
| DVD+RW |
8X (10.8MB/sec) |
8X (10.8MB/sec) |
| DVD-R |
16X (21.6MB/sec) |
12X (16.2MB/sec) |
| DVD-R DL |
4X (5.4MB/sec) |
8X (10.8MB/sec) |
| DVD-RW |
6X (8.1MB/sec) |
8X (10.8MB/sec) |
| DVD-ROM |
–
|
16X (21.6MB/sec) |
| CD-ROM |
–
|
48X (7.2MB/sec) |
| CD-R |
48X (7.2MB/sec) |
40X (6.0MB/sec) |
| CD-RW |
32X (4.8MB/sec) |
40X (6.0MB/sec) |
| Access Time |
CD-ROM: 110ms / DVD-ROM:
130ms |
| Burst Rate |
Ultra DMA mode 2: 33.3MB/sec
Multiword DMA mode 2: 16.6MB/sec
PIO Mode 4: 16.7MB/sec |
| Buffer Memory |
2MB |
| Drive Install Form |
Horizontal / Vertical |
| Size (W x H x L) |
163 x 232 x 50 mm |
| Disk Format |
DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD+RW,
DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD-RW, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM, CD-ROM/XA,
CD-Audio, Video-CD, Photo CD, CD-I(FMV), CD-Extra, CD-TEXT |
| Buffer Protection |
Applied |
| Lead Free |
Applied |
A lot of the more obscure optical drive features (which, coincidentally, tend
to vary more between drives) are not listed in the official specifications.
The screenshot from Nero InfoTool below fills out some of the missing features,
but even that didn't show everything. To fill in the last few missing gaps,
Exact Audio Copy
was used to detect the digital audio extraction features of the drive.
|
SAMSUNG WRITEMASTER SE-W164C (As reported by
Exact Audio Copy)
|
|
Accurate Stream
|
Yes
|
|
Audio Cache
|
No |
| C2 Error Info |
Yes |
| Overread |
Only Lead-in |
| Read Offset Correction |
+6 Samples |
| Write Offset |
-6 Samples |
| UDP/ISRC Support |
Yes |
| CD-Text Support |
Yes |
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