Wanted to share my experience with this:
Have a Dell XPS 420 that came with 16x DVD±RW Dual Layer. Drive was the TSST TS-H653B with latest DE300 firmware.
Problems:
- Backing up video DVDs at 16x = horrible quality burns even on my always reliable Verbatim 16x DVD-Rs. The image from the source disk on the HD was perfect, but the burn was awful. Video was choppy and froze. Nero DiscSpeed scores of 84 with tons of PI Fails. 8x seemed to work OK, 92-93 scores but still too many PI Errors/Fails for my liking.
- All copying software (Nero, IMGBurn, etc) reported it was able to change the book type to DVD-ROM, but all burned +R DL had the disc booktype instead of DVD-ROM after burning.
So I figured, gotta buy a new drive anyway, lets try crossflashing. I saw here and other places that it seemed this drive was in fact either the SH-S183B or SH-S203B. So I flashed it using -NOCHECK with the SH-S203B SB03 off samsung’s site. Worked perfect. Then used CodeGuys utility to rebuild SB03 with booktype set permanently to DVD-ROM (didn’t try to see if nero was able to change it on its own first, was sick of wasting discs), and to remove riplock. Not even sure if it had riplock, but hey, can’t hurt to disable. Haven’t tried the other tweaks yet but the booktype was the big one for me.
Burned a +R DL disc and sure enough it came out with DVD-ROM booktype (yay). I burned that one at 8x to be safe but with my 8x Verbatim DLs (that say in the fine print up to 10x compatible) it would let me select up to 12x I think, or maybe it was 10x. I’ll have to double check.
Burned a -R disc set to “maximum”. 16x verbatim disc and nero burned it at 18x. Scored a 98 in discspeed and video is flawless.
Nero discspeed reports the discs were burned in the SH-S183B even though I have the 203B firmware (possibly a side effect of the codeguys app?). Either that or this really is the 183 and not the 203. However on the “write disc” feature, it reports a speed of 20x, but I don’t have media to test that with. With DL media it reports 12x I think, possibly because of my DL media, not sure. But I think the 203 should be 16x.
So it seems like I have a mixture of the 183 and 203 specs. Maybe I’ll flash it with 183 firmware and see if that makes things look correct. However with the firmware as is, it is working perfectly.
So basically, the Dell firmware makes this drive a POS. Never understand how they can get away with that.
Hope someone else with this drive finds this useful. This firmware also enables DVD-RAM in this drive which wasn’t supported in the Dell firmware.