Real-world tests - method and notes (1)
Testing notes
The Nero suite supplied by Samsung includes a test utility - Nero CD-DVD Speed 4.51.1 - but the more we looked at the results, the less sure we were that these reflected real-world burns and reads.
Consequently, we carried out a series of burns where data was copied from hard disk to DVD and CD, then timed how long the Samsung took to read these discs and write their contents to hard disk.
All burning - DVD and CD - was carried out using the appropriate app within the supplied Nero 6 suite. In each case this was Nero Express but, when burning DVD movie files, we chose options to produce a playable movie disc.
Verbatim Europe very kindly supplied us with a big box of blank DVD and CD media of many different types (thanks peeps!) but some were not rated quite as fast as the Samsung's claimed burn speed for that particular type of disc.
Verbatim only had to hand 3x DVD-RAM discs when the Samsung is supposed to be able to write at 5x to suitable DVD-RAM media. Similarly, the write-once single-layer DVDs that Verbatim supplied to us - 16x DVD-R and 16x DVD+R - were below the Samsung's 18x maximum.
That said, write-once media rated at 18x is a pretty rare commodity right now. However, Nero saw our 16x DVD-R and 16x DVD+R Verbatim discs as being capable of burning at 18x and allowed us to select that top burn speed.
This 16x Verbatim DVD+R disc is
also LightScribe-compatible,
so by flipping the disc over in the Samsung burner, it's
possible to burn a label directly to the disc (click for larger image)
so by flipping the disc over in the Samsung burner, it's
possible to burn a label directly to the disc (click for larger image)
The Samsung is said to handle 8x DVD+R DL and 8x DVD-R DL but, although Verbatim provided 8x DVD+R DL, the only DVD-R DL blanks it had available to send at the time were 4x.
An oddity we noticed was that the burning speed option for DVD-R DL 4x media was greyed out within Nero - we don't know why. The speed was shown by Nero as being 4x but there was no way to reduce this, whereas that option was available with all other burns done within Nero on all other media, whether DVD or CD.
Intrigued, we check to see if the same limitation was in place when writing to DVD-R DL in the Samsung using different software - Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 - and found that it was.
However, when we used the same media in a different DL-compatible burner - an LG GSA-H10N in an external USB case - we were not only offered a lower speed settings in Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 but even one that showed that the drive recognised the 4x media as being 6x capable!
And, with Nero and that LG burner, the same was true so, seemingly, the Samsung isn't yet as compatible with DVD-R DL as it could be.
Burning from hard disk to DVD
Nero's ability to record the time that a burn takes overall - and in the various steps throughout - makes life a little easier for the tester but all the suite's apps tend to slightly under-report the time - though only by a few seconds. So with all the burning times we show here, we've added on a few extra seconds if we didn't also carry out a double-checking with a stop watch. Where we did double-check (which was in most cases) then the time we report is from the stopwatch.
Our two series of real-world DVD burning tests and used folders and files that were stores on a fast parallel ATA hard disk - as did our CD-burning tests.
The initial series of DVD-burning tests used a data folder that contained 114 sub-folders and 430 files - total size 4.21GByte.
The second used the Video_TS and Audio_TS folders from a movie DVD. Between them, those two TS folder held 11 files totalling 4.35GByte in size.
But we'll look first at that second series...