Samsung SM-332 Combo Drive Review - PAGE 1

At home I have a system that can support a limited number of available IDE devices, and I already have 3 Hard Drives and a CD-RW drive. Now the problem is that I have always wanted to watch DVD movies on this system, which has an otherwise good speakers and decent monitor. My friend has a Small Form Factor system, and he's faced with a similar problem: he just doesn't have the room to fit both a CD-RW burner and a DVD-ROM. A third friend, he was looking at getting a new system, but he didn't want to shell out cash to buy two drives that he essentially thought shared similar functionality: ie, the reading and writing to optical formats. Until the advent of combo drives, there was no easy solution to these predicaments, but Samsung and other good companies have been pushing the envelope in these combination optical drives, and now we have single devices that offer functionality at the same performance level of individual and separate CD-RW and DVD drives. Today we offer a look at Samsung's SM-332 drive, which offers 32X12X40X (write, rewrite, read) functionality as a CD-RW drive, and also reads DVDs as a 12X DVD-ROM.

Before beginning let's look at the specs for this drive:

Nero's InfoTool provides a good look at the detected features:

It's quite a thing to see so many read features along with CD-R and CD-RW. The only thing to top this would be a drive that also adds DVD-RW/DVD-RAM features! Also, while we've seen Samsung's older combo drives such as their SM-308 and SM-304, this new SM-332 is a far cry in terms of CD-R/RW write speeds and DVD read speeds.