TS-H552

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Samsung's burner is not only a reliable DVD drive, it is also a top-notch CD burner and CD ripper. If you have a large CD collection that you want to get onto your hard drive, then this drive will ensure that you spend as little time as possible waiting for your tracks to drop into your music library. Our 77 minute test CD finished ripping in only 4 minutes and 23 seconds.

Pros

  • Great CD burning and ripping, fast and reliable DVD writing

Cons

  • Discs often won't play on older players

Bottom Line

Strong CD writing, reading and ripping performance make this drive an ideal choice if you are after a replacement CD burner.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 129.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The fast DVD write rates for this drive also ensure that you won't be waiting too long for your data backups and movies to burn, with 8X DVD-R discs completing our test in just over seven-and-a-half minutes, and double layer discs taking only 23 minutes and 55 seconds. Its double layer burn capability is listed as 5X on the side of the box.

It's not all good news for this drive. Our burnt DVD+R DL disc was not recognised by our older Pioneer 106D DVD burner. On the other hand, our Zensonic Z330 media player had no trouble reading it.

DVD+R writing was slightly sluggish, taking 6 minutes and 9 seconds to burn our test disc, even though Nero CD/DVDSpeed reported an average data transfer rate of 12.08X using the CAV writing method.

One of the fastest rated drives on the market, the Samsung has many features aimed at improving the reliability of its burns, such as lens tilting and tighter power controls for the laser, which are especially useful when burning at the outer edges of a disc. Special power management technology is also used to keep heat and noise levels low, even when it is working at high speeds. We found the noise emissions to be reasonable during testing.

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