IN EARLY 2007, Lite-On broke the 20x speed barrier of DVD drives. Now, even as Blu-Ray is inching towards the mainstream, Samsung has eked out even more speed for DVD drives in the form ofthe SH-S223 that has a maximum rated DVD writing speed of 22x. The good news is that this drive is priced at the same mark as other (rated slower) drives, so Samsung is not charging a premium. The not so-good news is that for most practical purposes, the 22x burning capability of the drive will go unutilized, due to the non-availability of media that is faster than 16x.

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We used Nero's CD-DVD Speed tool to burn blank DVDs to full capacity and measure the time taken. We used commonly available DVD+R media from Moser Baer and HP, marked as 16x capable. The Samsung SH-S223 could identify both these disks as being only 18x capable and proceeded to write at this speed. At this speed, the drive took 5 minutes and 9 seconds to burn each disk. This is still lesser than the six minutes required to burn media at 16x speeds. In fact, even at 20x speed that the Asus 20x drive (DRW-2014L1T) managed with certain media; the time taken to burn a DVD was about five minutes 30 seconds.

The Samsung is faster over all. Other rated speeds are fairly standard 48x for CD-R, 32x for CD-RW, 16x for DVD+R dual layer and 12x for a DVD-R dual layer. Though you will seldom see 22x write speeds as already mentioned, given the fact that this drive does not cost more than other models, it makes for a good buy.