Samsung TS-H352

Once again we meet a drive from the joint venture Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology and we will regard it as a product from the company that’s promoting this model in the market. The drive has the typical design of Samsung’s optical drives with that round sunken eject button made of translucent violet plastic; a LED indicator resides next to it. The tray has rounded corners, too. The two symbols beneath the tray indicate the category of the device. There is no headphones socket here. Power and interface connectors, digital and analog audio outputs, and the jumper are found at the device’s rear panel.

The TS-H352 can read CDs at 48x speed and DVDs at 16x. The size of the cache buffer is 512KB. The declared access time is 90 milliseconds with CDs and 100 milliseconds with DVDs. The drive supports the E-IDE interface and the Ultra DMA Mode 2 data-transfer mode. The following media types are supported: DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD-Video, CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM/XA, Video CD, CD-I, Photo CD, Enhanced CD, CD-Extra, and CD-Text. The dimensions of the device are 148.2x42x184mm; its weight is 0.75kg. The drive can be positioned vertically or horizontally.

The average retail price of the drive is $25.

Testbed and Methods

To check out the operational characteristics of the DVD drives, we used the following programs and utilities:

• Nero CD-DVD Speed version 3.42;
• Nero Info Tool version 2.27;
• Nero CD DAE version 0.4B;
• Andre Wiethoff Exact Audio Copy (EAC) version 0.95 prebeta 5;
• Nic Wilson DVDINFOPro version 3.43;
• Ziff Davis Media CD WinBench 99 version 1.1.1.

The testbed was configured like follows:

• Intel Bonanza D875PBZ mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB;
• GeForce2 MX400 64MB graphics card;
• 512MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack1 and DirectX 9.0b installed.

The drives were attached to the mainboard’s second IDE channel as “Master”.