Plextor's Newest CD-RW Rocks!
Written: Aug 13 '00 (Updated Aug 28 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great performance, excellent software bundle, top notch driver support
Cons: Phone support needs serious improvement, warranty is only one year
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| rhreynolds's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32 |
This drive is so new that the manufacture date says "June 2000" and my invoice date said "June 27, 2000. It features a 12X record speed, previously available only on SCSI burners, and an industry first 10X rewrite speed, a full 2.5x the current 4X rewrite speed. It also features 32X CD-ROM performance, a 2MB buffer, and an IDE interface. The drive comes carefully and uniquely packaged and includes the popular Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4, Adaptec Direct CD, and Plextor's own PlexManager 2000 suite.
I must start off by saying that I was very intimidated by this drive. I had never before used a CD burner and my friends did'nt make it seem like a very user friendly technology. But this drive breaks the mould. It comes with two very detailed, very helpful manuals - one for installation and usage, and the other for the software packages. Within the hour I was burning my first Audio CD - a collection from the group 'Acappella' - using the PlexManager software. I was able to burn 11 mp3s directly to CD in CD Audio format, and it took less than 7 minutes, excluding the time to decompress the mp3s.
The rewrite feature is also impressive. It's often not mentioned that CD-RW discs must be formatted with a file system that allows them to be used like a regular removable drive. I'm told that at 4X, this format process took up to 90 minutes. But at 10X, this drive formatted the included Ricoh CD-RW disc in around 15 minutes - and throughout the whole thing, I was still able to use the system. Using Adaptec's Direct CD software, I was able to burn 2 zip discs worth of drivers and utilities to CD.
The drive features what Plextor calls BURN-Proof technology. This prevents bad writes or 'coasters' that result from buffer underruns. The buffer is the memory built into that drive that temporarily stores the data to be written. If this memory goes empty, the burning stops midway and the result is an unusable CD. Plextor's BURN-Proof monitors the buffer to anticipate and counteract underrun errors. I've burned several data and audio CDs and I've yet to make a coaster, so I guess BURN-Proof really works.
In terms of driver, firmware and software support, Plextor is great. The retail drivers were trouble free so no update is available yet, but prior to writing this review I downloaded firmware version 1.02. Firmware is the machine code that determines how the device works. The update promised to improve CD read performance and it did. Before, Need For Speed High Stakes would hitch when accessing new tracks. That no longer happens. And rip speed has also increased to 18X.
Plextor's phone support, however, is not so stellar. In this review I had initially rated the drive 5 stars, but in light of recent support issues, I thought it only fair to change that rating. The DiscDupe program in the Plexmanager suite would hang when writing an image of CD to hard drive. I contacted Plextor about this by e-mail, and while the turnaround time was reasonable, the advice missed the mark. Repeated replies to this rep yielded the same advice in different words, so much so that it seemed disrespectful to me. So I decided to contact phone support and what I encountered was simply disgraceful.
For four straight days I called and each time I heard "Currently all agents are assisting other customers and the phone cue is too long to accept other callers. Your call will now be disconnected." I finally got through this brick wall on the fourth day only to hear "You are caller number 6. Your wait time is 34 minutes." Now make no mistake, the rep I spoke to, while not the most polite person, was no less than an expert. He told me what to do and e-mailed me some updated files to fix the problem - problem solved. What troubled me was that this was 11 a.m. and he told me only 3 reps were on duty - three!
Don't get me wrong, I'm still pleased with the drive. You just can't beat the 12X record speed and 10X rewrite speeds, both of which are fixed (not variable) rates when you use certified media. And at 78 cents for a blank 700MB CD-R and $4 for CD-RW, the media comes much cheaper than the $9 I used to pay for Zip 100MB discs. And since everyone has a CD-ROM drive, it's much more transportable. But Plextor's support issues cannot be ignored. No matter how stellar the hardware, there is no excuse for crappy phone support.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rhreynolds
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Member: Raymond Reynolds
Location: NYC
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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