With the growing acceptance, and more importantly , lower prices of CD-R/RW drives, the speed race is on yet again in the world of optical drives. Samsung's latest CD burner in the SW series is capable of writing CD-R media at 32X, rewriting CD-RW media at 10X, and reading standard CD-ROM's at 40X. The aptly named SW-232 retails for about $75USD which is pretty good considering it has an 8MB buffer, comes bundled with Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5 and supports PureBurn / Justlink buffer underrun protection.

The SW232 has 512KB of flash memory so the firmware can be updated in the future if necessary; the drive we tested was using firmware version R300. The SW232 writes using a P-CAV write type and features a quiet geared tray mechanism (as opposed to rubber belt). The CD-RW can be mounted horizontally or vertically depending on your preference and application. Both the full sized 120mm CD's and smaller half-size 80mm CD's can be read.

The front bezel follows along with previous Samsung drives and uses a rounded tray cover for a clean and simple look. The only features on the front of the drive are the eject button, indication LED, headphone jack and volume wheel for audio disk playback.

Samsung SW-232 CDRW
	Ships with the following: User's Guide Easy CD Creator 5 CD Audio cable (4-pin connector) Philips mounting screws 40-pin IDE CABLE Manufacturer: www.samsung.ca

The rear of the drive features the standard assortment of connectors; IDE/Molex Power/Analog Audio and two-pin digital audio output terminal. The drive comes with an IDE cable, some screws, the bundled software, instructions and a four-pin analog audio cable.

The Samsung SW232 CD-RW is bundled with a proprietory version of Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5 which is a very good burning app compared to Ahead's NERO BurningROM. The Samsung burner uses "Super Link," "Just Link" or something which is basically like BurnProof to protect against buffer underrun errors. In any case the, the large 8MB buffer also helps to ensure that as few errors as possible muck up the burn process.

test system specs:
computer hardware:
processor:	amd athlon xp 2000+
clock speed:	1.67ghz
motherboard:	asus a7v266-e
chipset:	via kt266a
videocard:	ati radeon 8500
network card:	dlink de-528ct
memory:	256MB Corsair PC2400 CAS2 DDR
Hard Drive:	IBM 40GB Deskstar 7200RPM
Heatsink:	Taisol CGK760092
PowerSupply:	Enermax 431Watt
Software Setup	Windows 2000 Pro VIA 4in1 4.37V DetonatorXP 21.83 DirectX 8.1
Benchmarks	CD WinBench 99 V1.1 Nero CD Speed SiSoft Sandra 001