This may be of value to someone experiencing DVD reading problems with a
Samsung model SD-616E drive in their system.

After some extensive troubleshooting for a client, we have found that these
drives are unreliable when reading dual-layer DVD's. Brand new Dell
Dimensions, 4700 series came with these Samsung drives. They read single
layer (4.7Gb) DVD's and standard CD's just fine but will either not read a
dual layer DVD at all and finally gives up with a messagebox that says to
"Insert DVD" or read a bit then fail. These are brand new systems so the
drives are not dirty and all 3 systems have the same problem.

Dell is replacing the drives with a different brand and although they state
they have no knowledge of any problems with the drives - there are a number
of posts on their site (Community forums) that state others having similar
problems with the Samsung DVD drives. It could simply be a bad batch and I
don't want to bad mouth any product but if it takes a long time for a DVD to
be recognized (over 10 seconds) or fails to recognize there's a disc in the
drive - it just may be a bad drive.

If anyone has this drive and is running with a bios higher than F502, I'd
like to know how you got it updated and have you tested with a dual layer
DVD (~9Gb).

Some more info:

The bios revision on the drive was F501 and when I downloaded the updates
(F502, F503, F504, F505) from the Samsung site, the loader said none of
those versions were for that drive and obviously would not update.
Downloaded the one and only update (F502) for the drive from the Dell site,
and it loaded fine......?

Bob S.

[shudabiltmyown]

I just started having problems with this drive in a Dell Dimension 8400 I bought about 8 months ago. I was on F501 firmware and updated to F502. I can open the drive but putting any kind of media into the DVD player causes my computer to hang, and the read light indicator to flash on and off continuously. I was going to call Dell support, but it sounds like a bad.

Scott