By far the best 8X drive in the market! NO COASTERS!!!
Written: Jul 11 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speed, Speed, Speed, and Reliability, NO COASTERS!
Cons: Maximum read speed is not that great
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| aqc0643's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Burner |
JUST got this drive from buy.com about a week ago. Its the fastest thing I've ever seen. The Plextor 8/4/32 (8X Write, 4X Rewrite, 32X Read) is an IDE drive and you will need an EIDE interface for this drive to work. This baby can burn 650MB of data onto a disc in under 10 minutes! Before this drive, I was using an external 4X USB drive by HP (the HP CD-Writer Plus) and that one took about 22 mins to do the same thing. Installation of this drive was a piece of cake. The instruction manual is sufficient and what I love about this drive is that there are no additional drivers to install! Windows detected the drive on startup with no problems - the entire installation took under 10 minutes (from start to finish). The CD that they send with the unit contains the popular Adaptec Easy Creator, Adaptec Direct CD, and the Plexwriter Manager 2000. I didn't install the last one (Plexwriter Manager 2000) simply because I had no need to. I use the Easy CD Creator software for all my burning desires :)
*** The biggest advantage that this drive has over all the other drives in the market today is that the Plexwriter 8/4/32 comes with a generous 4MB buffer. Almost every other drive comes with 2MB or less. The 4MB buffer translates into fewer "buffer underrun" errors, which in turn translates into fewer coasters, which means you save $$! ***
I have already burned 10 CDs using this writer and not one has been bad! Oh yeah, by the way, the drive can also read and write to CDRWs at 4X. It does a good job at that too! I have had no need to call tech support at Plextor and I don't anticipate having to do so in the future either.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me to come up with cons, I would have to say that this drive has sub-par maximum read speed. You probably do, however, already have a decent speed CD-ROM drive so this should not really be an issue. If you need an awesome CD-ROM drive that reads instantaneously try the 48X drive by Memorex!
I bought the drive from buy.com for $180! I've seen it retail in stores for around $300! Either way, this drive is well worth the money. Its reliable, quick, and most of all has a great company with an awesome history of CDRWs backing it up. I don't anticipate buying another drive until the urge to splurge on electronics arises again :)Hopefully that will be in a few years :)
Good luck!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
aqc0643
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Member: Amit Chaturvedi
Location: Washington, DC
Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 5 members
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