One of you guys with this drive need to open it up and take some hi-res pictures of the circuit board... that is litterally the only way we'll be able to determine if there is a sister drive like the Xbox sammy and the 616 sammy.
I'm good friends with A@ron (writer of "the definitive 616t tutorial"). We're both very familiar with 616 modding, how and why it works. We need to know the model number of the chips on the circuit board as well as any model numbers printed on the actual circuit board. You get us that stuff and we can start working on cracking this new drive.

What do you think about the Samsung SD-616E? I ordered this drive some while ago as I though that I could get the SD-616T. The SD-616E is manufactured by Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology and I am afraid that this drive cannot be modified as it can be done with the SD-616T. Any comments on this would be welcome.
I got some `dirty disc errors` some time ago and started browsing message boards to find out with which drive I could replace my dying Thomson drive. My Thomson drive is still functional, but I wouldn`t bet that it won`t fail in future. If the LG drive turns out to be as "good" as the SD-616T and folks could find a compatible drive than can be modded, I would go for that one..