My last drive was a plextor 12/20, at the time it was top of the line, it was my first drive that I had bought myself to upgrade the stock 4x in my current computer then. At that point I knew I wanted my cdroms to be scsi. 2 reasons mainly, #1 I wanted the drives on a fast line of there own, not having to share with the hard drives, and #2, I planned to soon after get a cdr, and back then the best (if not only) cdr's where scsi.

Well that was about 3 years ago, and now its makeing odd noises when ever it spins, so I figured its time to get a new drive. Infact I upgraded both my cdrom and cdr, and it wasnt a big decision to go all out plextor. So for the cdrom replacement I picked up there ultraplex40x, the non wide scsi model cause my card only supported 50pin.

Installing it was a snap, not surprising with just a cdrom, once its connected, you let windows do the rest. So lets dive into preformance. The speed of the drive seemed to never let down, it was much faster then the 12/20x at everything, the real test was when I used CDspeed99, a bench mark program, it revealed good news. not only did the drive achieve 40x near the end of the disc, it EXCEEDED 40x, hitting above 41x, and the disc used was not full so it would have gone higher on a fuller disc. (Also this disc was a cdr, some of you probably know most cdrom's actually read cdr media at a tad slower rate then normal silver cdroms). what more can you ask for from a drive? its Min speed hit around 17x. It can read pretty much any cdrom format ever made. I did notice slightly more cpu usage then I would have liked, but then I could blame this on my scsi card, it is 3 years old after all.

The downsides are mainly audible. The drive is loud, and I dont think theres anyway around it, when you rotate a cdrom at 8000rpm's, its gona make noise no matter who makes the cdrom drive. There is one saving grace.. if you have plextor manager installed, you can "cap" the speed of the cdrom in real time, so say your playing a movie or something that dosnt require blazing 40x speeds (movies typically play at nothing more then 4-6x) you can cap it at lower speeds to slow down the cdrom and make it quieter. The cdrom also automaticly slows to around 25x when not accessed for like 8 seconds. Another annoying sound and I hope this isnt a defect in mine, but when the cdrom identifys a cd, like on power up and when you close the door, it makes a loud ticking noise for a second.

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