Thursday, July 30, 2009

Samsung SE-S084C Slim External DVD Burner

My wife's DVD burner in her Acer Power mini desktop failed to burn DVD recently. She has been nagging me to look into the problem but I have just ignored her calls, until she's away for an overseas trip.

So, I went down to Low Yat Plaza, first looking at whether able to find a replacement internal slot loading DVD burner. Found one shop, selling at RM200 per unit.

Well, judging at the price of external burners, which I found within the range of RM179 to RM289, why should I then go for an internal burner, although it is slot loading, but this is not the main concern.

The main concern is portability. Wife's MacBook Air is on her shopping list, I am using a MacBook and nothing else. She has got 2 Windows Desktops, a white label DIY stuff (by me, of course), and an Acer Power.

I do not want to have a burner, in fact I seldom use CD lately. Everything is transmitted either via network, broadband, 3G, or thumb drive. CD/DVD is already a past tense to me. Was even thinking of removing the DVD combo drive from my MacBook for a second HD :)

However, occasionally I may need to archive my work, documents, presentations, technical information, source codes, etc. Portable DVD burner comes handy.

After 2 rounds of visits to Low Yat, I finally settled with Samsung's SE-S084C external slim DVD burner.

The price, as well as Mac logo on its box, makes me decided on this unit. Although LG external burner looks better, but I am not able to ascertain whether LG works for MAC OSX.

The cheapest I found in Low Yat is RM210 for the Samsung SE-S084C, some selling at RM219, some even selling at RM249, but there are all the same make and model.

Brought home the burner, did a brief test. Burner is quiet as compare to the existing slot loading Mashita UJ-85JS on the Acer Power, and my MacBook's Mashita drive too.

Burning is surprisingly fast on my MacBook, athough the burner connects to my MacBook via USB, burning a backup DVD of 1.7GB, some 20,000 files, took around 3 minutes using Finder.

I am yet to test on the Acer Power, but I think the speed should be identical regardless of host and OS.

If you ask whether I am happy with the burner, I would say YES.

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