darkages: your suggestion worked; I had the dvd burner plugged into a SATA 6GB port. Thank you very much for the advice. Now for the technical question: why did that work?
Because the universe has smiled on you!

Some SATA devices need to be jumper configured to be SATA revision 1,2 or 3 controller compatible.
Sometimes there is a BIOS setting.... or you can use SATA3 plug on the motherboard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATASATA 1.5 Gbit/s and SATA 3 Gbit/s
The designers of SATA aimed for backward and forward compatibility with future revisions of the SATA standard.[citation needed] To prevent interoperability problems that could occur when next generation SATA drives are installed on motherboards with legacy standard SATA 1.5 Gbit/s motherboard host controllers, many manufacturers have made it easy to switch those newer drives to the previous standard's mode. For example, Seagate/Maxtor has added a user-accessible jumper-switch, known as the Force 150, to enable the drive to be switched between 1.5 Gbit/s and 3 Gbit/s operation. Western Digital uses a jumper setting called OPT1 Enabled to force 1.5 Gbit/s data transfer speed (OPT1 is enabled by putting the jumper on pins 5 & 6). Samsung drives can be switched to 1.5 Gbit/s mode using software that may be downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Upgrading a Samsung drive in this manner requires the temporary use of a SATA-2 (SATA 3.0 Gbit/s) controller while programming the drive.
blah blah... I'm sure you get the drift!
&
MSI H67MA-E45 Motherboard (& many others)
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/H67MA-E45.html#/?div=DetailOn-Board SATA
• SATAII controller integrated in Intel® H67 chipset
- Up to 3Gb/s transfer speed.
- Supports four SATAII ports (SATA3~6) by H67 PCH
• SATAIII controller integrated in Intel® H67 chipset
- Up to 6Gb/s transfer speed.
- Supports two SATAIII ports (SATA1~2) by H67 PCH
- SATA1~6 ports support RAID 0/1/5/10 mode
In short your> dvd: samsung sata dvd burner is being detected (/dev/sr0) when plugged into SATAIII controller but coms fail in operation.
- so use SATAII revision controller instead.
Cages.