What the heck am I talking about? Well, Samsung’s CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo drive of course. Unlike Combo drives from other competitors, the Samsung SM-348 belts out the most wicked drive specs this side of Saturn. For example, take a new-generation 48/24/48x CD-RW drive, open the tray, and stuff-in a 16x DVD-ROM drive and close the tray. Wave your hands, sprinkle 8MB of buffering cache, and clap your hands three times – Ta daaa! A pile of electronic junk. Luckily, you could drive to your local computer and home-electronics super-store and pickup Samsung’s SM-348 for probably less than a hundred bucks. Wipe that grin off your face and eat your cake.
I haven’t been this excited about an optical drive, well, since I bought a 6x Mitsumi CD-ROM for my Pentium-60 back in the day. Magic Carpet never played so well… Recently, I snagged a Pioneer DVR-A05 4x-speed DVD-RW drive for backup requirements for the site and other necessities. However, other than reasonably good DVD-R and RW burning speeds, its CD-R/RW and DVD-ROM/Video playback ratings are not fantastic. Sure, if you’ve got a Sony 4x CD-R at home and you want to move to the big leagues, a DVD-RW/+RW may be your best bet. However, if you’re anything like me, performance is key, and I have no time to waste waiting for spinning discs.
So, until Sony, Pioneer, or Samsung releases a 16x-speed DVD-R drive, I’ll be happy as a pig in, er, dung with a decent Combo drive. Several months ago, I was quite tempted to grab Samsung’s SM-332 which was their 32x Combo drive, and LG Electronics also had a somewhat appetizing combo drive as well, but truth be told, I was spoiled with my 32x Samsung CD-RW drive, and I didn’t want to slide-over to a combo – I wanted to move up!
Last month, Samsung Canada contacted me and asked if we wanted to check out some new ‘2003’ tech – one of these was the SM-348, and let me tell you, I think I actually physically drooled. Saliva was flowing, and I had an ache to get my hands on this. Perhaps the most appetizing feature was the fact that Samsung’s SM-332 did extremely well with other reviewers and their sites, and this one had 8-Megs of cache! So, sure enough, two days later a package bounced off my front door, and the dog and I slobbered all over it.