The best CD Writer Ever Made (Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32A)

Member Name: Laffin Assassin

Product:	Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32A
Date:	25/11/00 (316 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Over any other cd-writer it has plenty

Disadvantages: None I can find it is perfect and you can now buy them for £190

A few years ago the world was amazed with the idea of copying a compact disc on your home computer. Since then, a barrage of companies have jumped on the band wagon and produced their own CD recording drive. Growing from the turtle-like 1x to blazing fast 12x SCSI recorders, consumers have experienced every speed possible in these optical storage units. Until last week, a 12x write speed (1.8 Mbps) was only accessible by a CDRW that utilized the SCSI interface. Opening a new market, Plextor, a well known manufacturer of CDRW drives, introduced the world's first 12x CDRW that takes advantage of the IDE connection. The drive is virtually the same as Plextor's original 12x SCSI CDRW, only with an IDE connector. Lets see what the drive offers...

E-IDE (ATAPI-4) interface
12X CD-R, 10X CD-RW, 32X max CD-ROM
150ms Average Random Access
2 MB Buffer
Capable of Digital Audio Extraction at 24X max
Burn-Proof technology eliminates buffer underrun errors in fast write modes
Windows 95/98/2000 and NT4.0

One of the features that sticks out from other drives is the "Burn-Proof" technology that guarantees a perfectly burned CD every time the drive is used. The main problem that this new tech fixes are buffer underrun errors that occur when the source can't send data to the recorder at high speeds (i.e. at 12x). Although this error does not occur that often with 8x drives, moving up to 12x requires this safety net because people may be copying from slow CDROM drives or slow hard drives. Aside from this new feature, everything else on the drive is standard relative to most optical drives. The recorder works at 32x maximum read speed and a very speedy 10x (1.6 Mbps) re-write speed. With a 2 MB Buffer and 150 ms seek time, it will serve as a decent drive from a non-recording point of view.

There is only one way to show the audacity of this drive and that is to show how fast it burns. Plextor promises a 6 mi
nute burn for a packed 650 MB CD. Can they honor their promises? Indeed they can. I decided to backup a few of my games onto a CD. Measuring up to 645 MB, I used Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and began making the CD. After 5 minutes and 45 seconds, the flawless disc was done. The numbers don't lie folks...that's an amazing burn. However appealing the sub six minute burn time is, don't be fooled by it's glamour. The drive is very taxing on system resources and doesn't allow for much other multi-tasking to occur during the burn. When running the CD Tach 99 test, the CPU utilization went up to 43 percent. In addition to this, I put the drive in an Athlon 800 system that had 384 MB of PC133 SDRAM and was only running Explorer at the time, nothing else. When just running explorer, the system resources were up to 98 percent free. When performing a burn at 12x, the system resources dropped down to 63 percent. That leaves a good deal of room for other items, but multi-tasking becomes a slow and arduous process.

Aside from the resource hog that the drive is, it performed amazingly well. I burned eleven CDs ranging from data to music, all at 12x and never once encountered a problem or a bad disc. This is an excellent drive if you're willing to surpass one more barrier - the price. Plextor has given this unit an MSRP of £229.99 and has began shipping them to resellers for hopeful price breaks. In the end, if you want the best possible IDE CDRW drive and don't care about money, this is the one to get. However, if money is a factor, you may want to look into Plextor's 8x drive right here. Overall, I give the drive an eight of ten with the two point loss coming from the price and system taxation.

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