Hi All,
I got a Samsung SH-S203D a couple of weeks back, and I have been experiencing really slow burns with it on both DVDs & CDs 
Mainboard - Mercury PNMCP73V
SATA Controller - nVidia nForce 610i
The problem: No matter what speed I set, and what software I use, the drive is unable to burn at more than 4X for DVDs and 20-24X for CDs.
The simulation in Nero Discspeed or ImgBurn TestMode goes fine and says the media can be burned at 12X or 16X for DVD (48X for CDs), but when I start the actual burn, it goes fine for about 20 sec before the burn speed drops suddenly and then continues only at 4X for DVDs and 20-24X for CDs. Please see images of simulation and burn in the next post.
Discs I have tried so far:
CD-R = Verbatim, Sony, Samsung
DVD-R = Taiyo Yuden (TYG02)
DVD+R = Ricoh R03 (Office Depot Brand), Taiyo Yuden (Fujifilm - YUDEN000T02)
Burn Software I tried: Nero 6, ImgBurn, InfraRecorder
Other things I tried to solve this problem:
- Change SATA mode from AHCI to IDE with default microsoft drivers.
- Check, re-check and check again that the DMA is enabled. (It is. The HDD is in UDMA6 and the SH-S203D in UDMA5).
- Change the SATA cable.
- Change the SATA port. (Currently the HDD is on SATA1 and the S203D on SATA2 - they are on two different buses).
- Upgrade the drive firmware from SB00 to SB01
Nothing helped me :a - the drive behaves the exact same way in all these set-ups. All I have is a pile of CDs & DVDs that I have wasted on the tests... well not exactly wasted. Some of them work fine, but some of them show unrecoverable errors in the quality scans :sad:
I'd appreciate any tips or pointers to what the problem might be 
Thanks.