Outstanding drive and the BEST for value!
Written: Jan 26 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Fast write speeds, Excellent bundled software
Cons: Sub-par maximum read speed, Terrible digital audio extraction speeds
|
|
|
| tfung's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Burner |
The name of Plextor has long been synonymous with high quality CD-ROM technology, and has been thought of as the "Mercedes Benz" of it's industry. This last year we have seen a huge surge in the market for affordable, fast, CDR-W drives that look to compete against the likes of Zip drives and other removable storage media.
Plextor has once again, took their leading-edge brain power and has created their new 8x3x32 Plexwriter. To many peoples surprise they've finally broke away from a SCSI only format, and this time opted to go for EIDE.
When you consider that the majority of the computing population doesn't even own a SCSI controller, it doesn't take long to understand why they did this. Moving to the EIDE format might be considered a bold move by some considering that Plextor has always made the best of class drives around that were typically SCSI only. One look at what their competition is doing like HP and Creative Labs, it's only fitting and in Plextor's financial interest to do this.
The drive I am talking about is the new Plextor 8x4x32 CDR-W drive. At first glance one might ask, "why should I get this drive over others that are similar and maybe at a lower cost"?
Perhaps one of the coolest features of this drive is the Plextor Manager 2000 tools. With these programs of love, you have a powerful package for all kinds of functionality of the drive. First off the Plextor AudioCapture 2000 program is a great way of ripping your favorite Music CD's into wave files faster than you can shake a stick at. You get a selection of varying quality settings to choose from, however, I'm sure that most of you will just leave it at the highest possible.
The MVP program is sort of Plextors version of Windows Media player or Winamp, as once installed it becomes the default player for all kinds of music formats including CD-Audio and Mp3's. One feature that is kind of cool is the real time analyzer that it comes with, which gives you different modes in which to view it in. Kind of cool, but not real practical for most people I'm sure. The MVP, like Winamp, also lets you create a playlist which lets you setup the songs in whatever order you choose.
The Discdupe program provides you a quick and easy way to instantly dupe CD-ROM's either by going direct CD to CD, or with an image file. Either way I found this program to be very handy in those "crunch" times when you don't have time to mess around with the likes of a full-blown CD authoring program.
There is also, of course, the usual Adaptec Easy CD-Creator which is what most people consider to be the definitive program around for authoring CDR's and CDR-W's. The version included also comes with the CD-Copier Deluxe, which is simply Adaptec's way of letting you go CD to CD. And for those of you who like to drag and drop your files, there's even Adaptec's Direct-CD program which lets you use the drive right in your desktop explorer.
As far as the drives ability to burn, it ranks right up there with the best I've tried to date. Even burning from a source over my LAN at the office, I experienced none of those dreaded buffer under-runs. With its beefy 4MB buffer, making "coasters" will be a thing of the past. While I didn't get the chance to actually test my unit with 80min CDR's, I am told that this drive is totally compatible with 80min media. And in fact, it is now listed as a supported feature in the lastest version of the software you can download from their website.
There's no question about it, the Plexwriter 8/4/32 is one rock-solid, fast drive, and gives performance which is most acceptable by even the worst critics. The EIDE interface does start to drain the CPU once you kick in the higher read speeds, which shouldn't be an issue for most of the average people who'd purchase this drive.
There were a couple of areas I was kind of disappointed in, first was how the actual read speed was only 19.4x on average, and secondly how I could not get the drive to perform digital audio extraction any higher than 8.1X. However, the overall experience using this drive was a good one, and outside of the two sub-par performance issues felt confident that Plextor did make a very solid drive.
At a retail price of $299.00, the Plexwriter does make an excellent choice to backup your precious data, and makes for one heck of fast way to dupe your favorite CD'S, and couples this with CDR-W technology. While there are surely other similar drives on the market for around the same price, or even cheaper, none that I've used to date came with such a complete software package, and gives you the most complete package making it the best value around that I've seen.
With the CDRW market becoming even more crowded, it's becoming even more important to choose a drive that not only has good brand name, but also one that is going to offer the end user the most complete out-of-box experience. With the Plextor 8/4/32 Plexwriter, you have an entire history backing you up in your purchasing decision. Along with this history comes an expertise that is rarely found in most other drives of its kind. Overall, this is probably the best value CDR-W you can find on the market today.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
tfung
|
|
Member: Terence Fung
Location: Brighton, MA
Reviews written: 93
Trusted by: 31 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.