Burn Testing

As we mentioned before, this drive does not support Just Link as it was released before this excellent feature became essentially standard on burners. With its 2MB you should be okay for the most part. Systems that are unstable, or have a lot going on will no doubt experience the odd "buffer underrun error" and there isn't really anyway we can test for the likelyhood of this occuring. Suffice to say, while we tested the SM-308 for burning some backup disks we didn't experience any errors of this sort.

The included Easy CD Creator is good for intermediate users, who need only follow a wizard that does most of the burning for the. Personally, I loaded in a copy of NERO just because I find it a bit quicker to work with but that is just my preference.

The SM-308 can burn CD-R's at up to 8X so it is rather slow compared to pure CD-RW drives. Since the media we most often use for CD-RW jobs is limited to 4X regardless, I don't think that this is limiting in any way. It would be nice to burn CD-R disks at 16X, but then you might as well look for a more recent drive release.

Conclusions

In order to cram in all the compatibility into the Combo Drive some of the higher speeds have been sacrificed, so if you really need the fastest CD-RW burner, or DVD drive, or CD drive you would be best served getting top of the line drives that offer little other than their main features. Where the combo drive comes in very strong is with users who need all the functionality, but don't really require more than average read/write speeds.

In this case the Combo drive offers a one-stop optical 'shopping' location for good DVD playback, decent CD-RW burning, and somewhat slow 8X CD-R burning. With those considerations noted the SM-308 makes a useful addition to any computer system that simply lacks the space or desire for two or three individual optical drives.