Disc recognition
We're going to start things off with our disc recognition tests, since putting a disc into each of the drives is the first thing we did after hooking them up. Perhaps the most annoying thing about optical drives is the time it takes for them to spin up and recognize a newly inserted disc, even if all you want to do is browse the CD's contents. Let's see how Samsung's two drives stack up here.

The SW-240 is faster across the board, and it recognizes pressed CDs, CD-R, and CD-RW discs quicker than the SM-332. As you might expect, pressed CDs are picked up the quickest, followed by CD-R discs and then CD-RW discs for both drives.

Since the SM-332's read speed is identical to the SW-240, I'm inclined to think the difference in disc recognition times has more to do with the SM-332's DVD capabilities than anything else.

File copy
Whether you're restoring backups or installing a game, dumping the contents of a CD onto a hard drive is probably the best way to stress a drive's maximum read speeds in the real world. Theoretically, a drive with a maximum 40X read speed transfers data at as much as 6,000KB/sec. We'll see how close the two drives get in a real test.

Both the Samsung drives have identical 40X read speeds, so the time to copy all the data from a 646MB CD is virtually identical between them no matter which media is used. The SM-332 combo drive is slightly slower than the SW-240, but the performance gap is very small.

As you can see, both drives are noticeably slower reading from CD-RW media, but that's to be expected; all optical drives tend to have lower performance with CD-RW media than with factory-pressed discs and CD-R discs because of the lower reflectivity of CD-RW media that makes rewriting possible.

Neither drive approaches the 108 seconds it should take to copy the 646MB disc given theoretical limits, but that's not surprising. Optical drives need to be wound up to hit their peak speeds. Let's take a look at how performance scales as the drives crank over and open up.