Samsung announces high-speed combo drive

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By Martyn Williams

(IDG) -- Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has announced a series of four new optical disc drives that feature high speeds and, on one of the units, cross-platform compatibility.

The first of the four is a CD/DVD Combo drive that couples rewritable CD technology with DVD (digital video disc). The SM-316B drive boasts DVD-ROM read speed of 12x making it one of the fastest such drives available. In addition, it can read CD-ROMs at 40x, write to CD-RW discs at 16x and re-write at 10x, said Samsung.

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The company also announced a DVD-ROM drive, the SD-616F, which can read data at up to 16x and the SC-512L CD-ROM drive, which can read data at 52x. The drives will cost 99,000 won (US$77) and 46,000 won, respectively.

The final drive of the four is a CD-RW drive, the SW-216B, which features 16x writing, 10x re-writing and 32x reading. It features a constant linear velocity system, which means the drive speed changes depending on the area of the disc being written to keep data flow rate constant. Samsung has not yet fixed the price on that drive.

All four drives are scheduled to hit the Korean market in August, said Samsung. Plans for launching the drives overseas have not yet been determined.