PlexWriter 12/10/32A - Official burner of the l33t h4x0r
Written: Apr 29 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speedy, reliable, BURN-PROOF technology
Cons: Bundled software sucks
The Bottom Line: Excellent drive, with the minor drawback of a poor software bundle. Highly recommended nonetheless.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32 |
Ah yes, the Plextor CD writer. Well, shall we take a look at what the fine folks at Plextor are slinging these days?
Specs:
IDE/ATAPI-4 standard interface
12x max CD-R burn
10x max CD-RW burn
32x max CD read
2mb buffer, 150ms avg access time
Basically, a pretty standard setup for an IDE CD-ROM drive. The 3 in 1 (CD/CD-R/CD-RW) is very handy, though I only use CD-R and CD at this time. Nothing really to say here, as the specs aren't really anything special. The drive does support burn-proof technology, which is nice, as it drastically reduces the number of 'coasters' (bad CDs) you produce.
Installation: Installation was a snap, as most CD-ROM installs are. Set the jumpers on the drive, slide it in, attach the cables, and screw it in tight. Install was pretty much wham, bam, thank you ma'am, and bears little in the way of scrutiny. The drive gave me no troubles whatsoever on boot, and Win98, XP Pro, and Slackware 8 had no qualms about recognizing the drive and putting it to use.
All three OS's had drivers for the drive in their standard libraries, so no install disk shuffling was needed.
Software: The PlexWriter 12/10/32A comes with a rather disappointing software bundle. There is a utilities suite for the drive, that contains monitoring software, as well as audio/data cd burning proggies, and even a media player(why?). My Plextor also came with Roxio's Easy CD Creator, a music burning proggie. While the bundled software was not in any way bad, there are just so many programs out there that are far better. Nero and CloneCD leave any of the PlexWriter's bundled progs sucking dust to no end. The management suite was a nice touch for inexperienced users, but I uninstalled it after about 3 minutes. While it is nice to know what my drive is doing at all times, I can figure it out without an annoying splash screen on startup, yet another tray icon, and another process sucking down precious resources.
Ease of use, and other issues: No major qualms about this drive. Nero likes to grab complete control of my system for about 4 seconds while it burns lead-ins on CDs, and the drive takes a few seconds to eject when running at speed, but aside from that, I have no problem with this drive at all. Burn Proof is handy, as it will make sure that the burner is smart enough to know not to keep burning even if the source drive stops supplying data to be burned. This is very handy, and lets me utilize other processes while the burner is doing it's thing. (This does add to the burn time, as I'm stealing resources from the burner to use for other things.)
Conclusion: Overall, I'd give the PlexWriter 12/10/32A a score of about 8 out of 10. It's a solid, stable, good performing drive. Burn-Proof is a great technology, and helps save on ruined CDs. The only downside the the drive is it's fairly craptacular software bundle. If you can overlook that issue, this is most definitely a good burner for your money.
Recommended:
Yes
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Action_Snark
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