With blank 40X CD-R disc in the SW240 drive Nero CD-Speed will run some burn speed tests. The results, which are shown above, indicate that the SW240 doesn't really offer an improvement in write speed over that of the SW-232 for CD-R media. Things tend to top out at 32X which is interesting, and which makes us wonder if perhaps the media we tested the drive with is really rated for 32X and not 40X.

The future is siding with CD-RW media, and at least here we can see an obvious improvement in terms of performance. The CDRW media runs through a simulated burn at 12X - just as it ought to.

So what can you talk home from all these charts, and burn/read times?

A couple things. First off, in our tests the Samsung SW240 doesn't appear to offer any faster CD-R burn times than the SW232 even though the drive and the media we tested with were supposed to be rated for 40X. CD data read times did increase to that mark, but we were left with just 32X for burning CD-R media - which is still pretty good all things considered. Is this a case of mislabeled recording media, or is this a case of the SW240 not quite living up to its specs? We're not really sure, but then again these are theoretical limits.

With built-in support for the new CD-MRW technology the SW240 offers a good set of features for future proofing in addition to the standard buffer underrun prevention utilities we all instinctively look for as we browse the store shelves.