Samsung SW-232 review @ CDRLabs.com

Although 40x writers are coming more and more common a new review of a 32x drive can be found over at CDRLabs.com. This time they've taken a look at the Samsung SW-232, a 32/10/40 drive:

The latest drive from Samsung to hit the stores here in the US is the SW-232B. This new CD-RW offers 32x writing, 10x rewriting and 40x CD read speeds. To prevent coasters caused by buffer underruns, Samsung has given the SW-232B a huge 8MB buffer along with support for Ricoh's JustLink technology. To keep the writing quality as high as possible, the SW-232B also has Ricoh's Optimum Writing Speed Control technology, JustSpeed.

The SW-232B performed very well when reading pressed and CD-R discs. Along with low seek times, the drive had no problems exceeding 40x. When reading CD-RW discs it was another story. Like many of the other 32x writers I've tested, the SW-232B was able to read CD-RW discs at only 32x. This really isn't that big of a deal, but the drive's DAE speeds were also limited to 32x. This makes the SW-232B one of the slower 32x writers around when it comes to ripping audio CD's.

The SW-232B's writing performance was also a mixed bag. Thanks to one of the highest average writing speeds found on a 32x writer, the SW-232B was able to write our test data in record time for a 32x writer. Unfortunately, I did run into some problems where the SW-232B would not consistently write at 32x to some of our test media. Hopefully Samsung can tweak this a little in future firmware updates.

The Samsung performs pretty well getting an overall score of 9. The retail price of the drive is about $130. You can read the complete review of the Samsung SW-232 here.

Source: CDRLabs.com