As you can see from the picture below, the Samsung WriteMaster SE-W164 is capable of operating standing on its side. There are clips on the drive tray which ensures that the media stays in place. This is also very useful for mobile users who are tight on space.

With the dimensions of 16 x 23 x 5 cm, the SE-W164 is not large for an external optical drive, but weighs in at 1.2kg - too heavy to really be carried around with a notebook unless you are very determined to do so.

During operation, the Samsung WriteMaster SE-W164 was very quiet, and did not produce a lot of heat or noise. In fact the unit was so quiet that at times I thought drive was not powered.

As mentioned earlier, the Samsung SE-W164 is a very capable DVD burner and it is able to read CD ROM's at 48x, CD-R/RW media at 40x, DVD-ROM at 16x, DVD+/-R's at 12x and DVD+/-R/RW and dual layer media at 8x. It is able to write CD-R's at 48x, CD-RW at 32x and DVD+/-R med at 16x, DVD+RW at 8x, DVD-RW at 6x, DVD+R DL at 8x and DVD-R DL at 6x.

The drive also supports all the normal writing methods such as TAO (Track at Once), DAO (Disc at Once) as well as DAO/96, SAO (Session at Once), Multi-session, Variable Packet Writing, Fixed packet writing and Multi-track reservation.