The PlexWriter 12/10/32A, made by Plextor, is one of the hottest CD burners out there right now. All of a sudden, I can burn an entire CD’s worth of data or music in just about 6 1/2 minutes. The PlexWriter 12/10/32A is just the latest and greatest offering by one of the leaders in the ever-evolving CD burner industry.

Just a few years ago, however, a CD burner was just about as much a thing of fantasy as a flying car. Well, not quite, since CD burners certainly existed, but the idea that your average computer user would be able to purchase one for his own use was certainly far-fetched until relatively recently. In recent years, though, consumer-marketed recordable (CD-R) and re-writeable (CD-RW) CD-ROM drives have progressed from not being available at all, to being an experimental technology with many quirks and glitches, to being a fast, stable method of transferring files.

Since the beginning of the boom of affordable CD-R and CD-RW drives, Plextor has been at the forefront, consistently developing some of the best-rated drives out there. Unfortunately, Plextor is not as well known to the general public as are many other large computer component manufacturers, such as Dell, Compaq, HP, etc. While presence and being well-known in the consumer market is certainly not necessarily any indication of the overall quality of a company’s products, it can definitely hurt their sales.

I must admit that I, myself, was somewhat reluctant to purchase a Plextor drive at first. After all, I had never previously had any experience whatsoever with any Plextor products. Nevertheless, on the basis of lots of good reviews around the industry, as well as several personal recommendations from others, I finally decided to try them out. I recently purchased a Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32A drive to replace my somewhat older Hewlett-Packard HP8250i drive. There were two main issues which I hoped to rectify in upgrading to a newer CD burner:

1. The HP burner I had been using for the past year or so had a tendency to create coasters. While it’s basically inevitable that any CD burner will have some unsuccessful burn attempts, it certainly seemed that my HP8250i was failing at an alarming rate. It is my personal opinion that Adaptec’s CD creation software (the Easy CD Creator series) is much less than the best software that could be, and this surely adds to the likelihood that a burn attempt will fail every now and then.

2. The second reason I was looking to replace my old CD writers was, frankly, that I just wanted a faster drive. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with a 4x write-speed, the prospect of being able to burn a CD in one-third the time was certainly attractive to me.

One the first count, my new PlexWriter 12/10/32A has been highly successful thus far. To put it simply, no more coasters! Out of about twenty or thirty burn attempts in the two weeks or so that I’ve had my PlexWriter, all but one have been completely successful. The one time I did have an unsuccessful burn, it was because Adaptec Easy CD Creator froze in the middle of writing to a disc. While there’s no way to tell whether this was due to an error caused by Easy CD Creator or by the drive itself, I have my suspicions –- I’ve never liked that particular piece of software to begin with. With a success rate of about 95-97%, however, I’m certainly satisfied enough that I’m not going to worry too much about wasting a 20-cent CD-R -- especially when it only takes about 6 1/2 more minutes to burn the CD right the second time.

As far as the increased write-speed capabilities are concerned, my PlexWriter 12/10/32A has met all of my expectations to a “T,” as I mentioned earlier. You just can’t beat being able to burn an entire CD in practically the time it takes to visit the bathroom, clean out the litterbox, open the day’s mail, etc. Combined with my brand-new, much faster hard drive (a Seagate Barracuda ATA II) and a large amount of memory, any kind of write goes relatively quickly -- even a CD-to-CD straight copy.

One of the features of the PlexWriter 12/10/32A which helped me settle on this particular drive is something Plextor calls “BURN-Proof Technology.” BURN-Proof stands for “Buffer UnderRuN Proof,” which purports to guarantee your ability to multi-task while you burn, without worrying about creating a new set of coasters each time. Basically, this technology keeps close track of both the current state of the buffer and where the disc is being burned at any given moment. As a result, if the buffer is used up at some point, rather than reporting a buffer underrun error and effectively giving you an ugly coaster, like most drives do, the PlexWriter 12/10/32A stops writing until the buffer returns to a manageable level, at which point it continues writing where it left off. I’ve continued to do other things on my computer while the drive was writing on several occasions, and I have yet to have it cause a problem.

After everything I’ve just told you, the only reason I can think of why anyone might be wary of purchasing one of these excellent drives would have to be price. After all, something like this is bound to be expensive, right? Well, not really. After a few minutes’ worth of research on PriceWatch.com, I was able to purchase mine for $216 with free shipping. That having been said, I can’t see any reason why someone who wants or needs to be able to burn CDs wouldn’t buy one of these. Why are you still here? Go buy one! Well, rate this review first –- then buy one. Thanks.

Recommended: Yes