Samsung and Toshiba have recently joined forces to produce optical drives. One of their best offerings is the Samsung TS-H552U 16X DVD+/-RW drive. In addition to providing high write speeds for DVD+/- media, the TS-H552U is capable of 5X burns to DVD+R DL.

DL (Dual Layer) media lets you store up to 8.5GB of data--or 4 hours of video--on a single disk, and the high speed seriously decreases the amount of time it takes to fill up one of these monsters. It took not much longer than 20 minutes to complete a full burn. While this may not seem very fast, when DL drives first came out it took them over an hour to finish a burn.

The drive's DVD-rewrite speeds aren't as impressive. At 4X for both DVD-RW and DVD+RW, there are a lot of other drives on the market that can perform rewriteable backups much faster. However, the CD-RW speeds of 40X/32X/48X are some of the fastest we've seen from a DVD-writer.

Samsung doesn't include any blank media with the TS-H552U, but there is an excellent suite of applications from Ahead Software bundled with the drive. This includes Nero Express 6, one of the easiest-to-use tools for CD and DVD burning on the market. In addition, there's Nero BackItUp for creating and scheduling backups and InCD 4 for packet writing.

The beige drive looks rather basic in a chassis, and it doesn't include a headphone jack or volume control (although many vendors have begun leaving these extras off their drives). You can also find the drive in black, so check around if you want to get a bezel that matches your tower.

There's a 2MB buffer on the drive and buffer underrun protection built in to prevent errors during burns.

If you don't need the highest rewrite speeds, Samsung's TS-H552U 16X DVD+/-RW drive is a bargain for users looking for a DL DVD-writer.

Pro:  Fast DVD+R DL speed, great price.
Con:  No blank media included.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
105 Challenger Road
Ridgefield Park, NJ 07660
800-726-7864
http://www.samsung.com

Warranty
1 year