Samsung CDRW 8x8x32

Purchased the SM-308 COMBO CDRW/DVD from PC World. At the time I already had a Philips x2 speed writer but this was a bit slow and I also fancied a DVD player. The box said it required a PII 266Mhz. My machine was a PII350 so I thought I would have no problems. INSTALLATION ------------- The installation was easy and the instructions were OK. DVD's ------ The first issue was when you read the manual it stated that to play DVD Movies you would need at least a PII 400 - Why is this not on the box!. My DVD movies actually played OK. CD Writting ----------- After about 6 weeks of recording some data ...  Read the complete review

This is just a warning to everyone who would like to buy the Samsung SM308 CD-RW/DVD. I have bought this driver and it works really well to play DVDs and copy CDs. I advice you to use PCFriendly DVD player and not PowerDVD which comes with it. You can get PCFriendly by renting The Matrix (the software can be installed from The Matrix DVD). Also, DO NOT use the SM308 as an external driver as it will overheat and burn. I know this from experience. If you do use it as an external drive (usually with the Freecom box), then only use it for 2 hours, then let it cool down before using it again. Just thought I'd let everyone know so ...  Read the complete review

I bought this CDRW from a computer fair. I have several Samsung products so thought that this was a good buy. It came unboxed but with a user manual & Adaptec 4.0. Adaptec works reasonably well but sometimes takes about 10 minutes to close the session. When I use Nero, which worked very well on the LG writer I had, it repeatedly comes up with buffer under run error and corrupts the CD. The Samsung website is useless. There is no technical support/user manual/driver update for this writer. I also found nothing on a web search either which worries me a lot. Since this is the same price as an LG writer I would recommend LG which has much better support. I was told by the ...  Read the complete review

I paid £100 for this CD-RW including fitting. The Adaptec software was conflicting with something already installed and would not work at all. I swapped to Nero software and have had no problems since. Burning audio CDs from MP3 files means having to create an image file onto the hard drive first, this takes an average of 10 - 20 mins and 400-600 Mb of disk space. The image file can then be burnt at 8x with 99% success. This is the first CD-RW I have ever used and after the change to Nero software I am surprised how simple and error free it is, working well on a low spec machine with a Cyrix 333MHz CPU & 64 Mb RAM ...  Read the complete review