Model: Samsung SE-S084C
Rating: 8 out of 10
Price: $92 inc. GST (street)
Web: www.samsung.com.au
External DVD burners have come a long way in the last few years with most 5.25-inch drives giving way to smaller notebook-style models.
The Samsung SE-S084C is one of the cheapest we’ve seen at under $100 street price. The drive is USB-powered only and depending on the USB port you use, you may need a double-A type adapter cable to power it.
The drive burns DVD+R/-R media at only 8X speed maximum but burns CD-Rs at 24X-speed.
On our 4.37GB full-capacity DVD-R test burn, the SE-S084C took 11min41secs to complete the burn.
Overall burn quality was quite good although we did see an out-of-spec PIF erroc ount of 8 (maximum allowed is four). The overall PIF and PI error counts were well above average in our tests (PI error max 27, PI error total 139,835 – PIF max 8, PIF total 1504).
The PIF spike of 8 won’t mean the disc is unreadable and the underlying trend of errors was low.
Nero supplies its Nero 8 Essentials software package to handle burning on Windows PCs.