Samsung SE-S084 External DVD Writer Review

Installation

The installation is very easy. The only trick is that you need to have two available USB ports. Since it is powered from USB ports, a single USB port is not enough to provide all the current required by this drive. The cable that comes with SE-S084, however, assumes that you have these two USB ports right next to each other on your netbook. If this is not the case with your netbook (e.g., it has one USB port on its left side and the USB port is located on its right side) you will need a cable extender, which is optional and doesn’t come with the product.

The cable is somewhat short (20 ½” or 52 cm) for using this unit with a desktop PC, but it has the right length for using the unit with a portable computer.

Figure 5: Cable.

Samsung SE-S084 comes with a CD-ROM containing Nero 8 Essentials and Firmware Live Update. The first one provides all necessary programs for burning and copying CDs and DVDs, while the second one not only updates the firmware from the writer but also keeps running in the background to automatically update it whenever a new firmware version is released. Upgrading the DVD writer firmware is equivalent to upgrading the motherboard BIOS: keeping it up-to-date ensures your unit is free of bugs and compatibility issues that might have been discovered.

The greatest news for netbook owners is that Samsung SE-S084 can be used as a boot device, allowing you to boot from the operating system CD for repartitioning and reformatting the hard disk drive and installing the operating system from scratch. For this feature to work you need to enter the BIOS setup program from your portable computer and change the boot priority option to put the optical drive as the first boot device, otherwise the computer will still boot from the hard drive even if you have the operating system CD inside the optical unit.