Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it developed a new CD-RW/DVD disc drive that is only 9.5mm in width. The new SU-324B is extremely lightweight (145 g)and will be used in notebooks. Availability of the new drive is expected in February 2004.

The disc drive supports CD-ROMs, CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-ROM formats, and can read and write up to 24x speed for CD format, and 8x speed for DVDs.

According to the Samsung the new product is much thinner than the existing slim combo drives, which are 12.7mm in width, but are equipped with the same functions.