CDRLabs.com

Of the two combo drives, SOHC - 5235K usesABS® mechanism to reduce vibration & noise while high speed rotating while,

SOHC - 5232K uses VAS® to reduce vibration & noise during recording & reading .

There may be other differences that I am unaware of.

Given a choice, which is the better of the two?

Thanks in advance.

bimbla.

interesting...all of the CD-R/W drives, DVD writers and combo drives use VAS except for the SOHC - 5235 which uses ABS.
on the other hand most all of the CD-ROM drives use ABS.

i wonder what the difference between the 2 'technologies' are.

I have a 5232K and the only differance I could see was the 5235 doesn't have a headphone plug and volume control.
BTW...both don't support DVD-RAM.

dodecahedron wrote:i wonder what the difference between the 2 'technologies' are.

VAS:

Name: Isolated Absorber System
Slogan: VAS
Similar design: Pioneer
Advantage: Small vibration on Traverse / Pickup & Cover
Dis-advantage: Space limitation, hard to design the isolated absorber

ABS:

Name: Auto Balancer Spindle
Slogan: ABS
Similar design: LG, Samsung
Advantage: Lowest vibration in high rotation speed
Dis-advantage: Sacrifice balance disc, hard to design, different design result different

(Found here along with diagrams for several other suspension designs)

It is hard to see in the small diagram above, but ABS also has a series of ball bearings that are designed to distribute themselves to balance the disc:

Steel balls as balancer within spindle motor will be settled into right positions during spin up period ( that’s the reason why a lttle noise during drive spin up to read a disc ) to compensate imbalance of the disc when rotating at very high speed.

I have an old 166S with ABS. The ball bearings make an odd "whiiiish" sound when the drive spins up on load and down on unload.

cfitz