Review Samsung SW-248 CD-RW Drive

I thought I would write a review of they new CD-RW drive that I got on Friday.

My Emachines Pentium 3 had a built in DVD-ROM that got sporadic after three years of heavy use when I used it as my main DVD player. The motor got slow and so I decided to pull it out and get one of the new fangled Samsung 48X CD-RW drives. Wal-Mart had them for $60 and I read good reviews of the drives. It is true that Samsung made the now dead DVD-ROM but I blame it's death on my constant use and abuse of it. I used to watch a lot of movies on it so it probably got years of use in those three years. Also Samsung made my microwave oven that I love.

Now I never have built a PC from scratch so I was a little worried about the installation. But it was easier than I thought and only needed a screw driver and I didn't need to radically change the wiring due to the fact that I was swapping out a drive. It was not idiot proof but it was not brain surgery.

Redhat Linux 8 had no problem configuring the new drive automatically. Windows 2k worked well but it took me an half and hour to click through all the install drivers for the USB device changes but I get that whenever I unplug or move stuff.

The software is a basic version of Roxio Easy CD Creator 5. It is not my favorite burning program but it gets the job done. Nero Burning Rom is my favorite and it had no problem with the new drive.

So took my Sony External USB 4x CD-RW and dropped it off an BBQ's swinging bachelor pad and he is going to pay me 50 bucks for it.

The 8 Meg buffer worked perfectly and I was able to burn data files at 40X off my external USB2 hard drive with no problem. I burned a Audio CD from some mp3 files and it toasted at around 20x due to the stops in the tracks. I was also able to rip a CD to mp3 in a about a minute with this bad boy.

So you might be wondering how a $60 CD-RW works? I can respond with confidence. "Pretty damn well".