DVD-RAM writing performance:

The Samsung SH-S203B is a so-called Multi drive, meaning it also supports the DVD-RAM format.

This drive is one of few drives that also supports the DVD-RAM format, lets us look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

We can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which are embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

A DVD-RAM’s disc can be formatted in the following formats:

• FAT32
• UDF 1.02
• UDF 1.50
• UDF 2.00
• UDF 2.01
• UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done as “background processes”. Meaning you do not have to wait for it to finish, you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any “hangs” or CPU slowdowns.

DVD-RAM has error correction, but also has error replacement to spare sectors as a "defect management" function. This gives higher reliability than other DVD format.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written at over 100.000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors. Let’s try to read back the 2 discs that we wrote:

Lets us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests.

Maxell 12x rated DVD-RAM media

As we can see, the Samsung SH-S203B wrote our 12x DVD-RAM media at its maximum rated speed of 12x in 5 minutes and 44 seconds.

Now let’s see if the Samsung SH-S203B can read our test disc.

The Samsung SH-S203B had no problems in reading our test disc at 12x.

We then ran a scandisc to check for errors. As we can see from the above screen shot, there were no errors on the disc.

Maxell 5x rated DVD-RAM media

As we can see, the Samsung SH-S203B wrote our 5x DVD-RAM media at its maximum rated speed of 5x in 11 minutes and 10 seconds.

Now let’s see if the Samsung SH-S203B can read our test disc.

The Samsung SH-S203B had no problems in reading our test disc at 5x.

We then ran a scandisc to check for errors. As we can see from the above screen shot, there were no errors on the disc.

Summary:

The Samsung SH-S203B proved reliable at both reading and writing our test DVD-RAM media. When using 12x media the drive completed a full disc in 5 minutes and 44 seconds, which should be fast enough for every day backups.

To round of this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Samsung SH-S203B on the next page…