KICK @$$ CDR
Written: Jan 05 '00 (Updated Dec 30 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Phenomenal Speed and Stability from an EIDE drive, great price!
Cons: Haven't found any yet
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| Turin's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Burner |
I asked for a cdr for Christmas this year. My mom doesn't know what a hard drive is, so she told me to go buy one myself and she'll pay for it and wrap it (big surprise). So i cruised some sites to look for the best cdr i could get. I thought a plextor would be way out of my price range. It wasn't. I went to a show and it cost just as much if not cheaper than some Acer/HP/Sony models i saw there. I bought mine for $250 at the show, maybe the best $250 I ever spent.
Burning:
8x is NICE, I can't describe how nice it is. My friend's had a burner for a few years, he's gone through 2 or 3. It always took forever to burn a cd. Mine burns a cd in about 10 minutes. SWEET.
Stability:
So far i have not had one failed burn with my cdr. I haven't tried burning any rw's cause cdr's are so cheap, and i don't really need a rewritable cd. I also would rather burn a cdr in 10 minutes than an rw in 20. Still, a perfect record is fine by me when it comes to burning. Combine this with the speed it burns and its just awesome. My friend would spend half an hour to an hour to burn his cds, and he would just be happy that it burnt properly. Mine go in 10 minutes fine. I even started burning cd to cd on the fly. This is considered a no-no by most of my friend's with burners. Too much system stress leads to bad burns. I have a p2-400 with 128 megs of ram, that helps. I am reading of a 20xvariable drive (Creative DVD 2x). I think what really helps though is the 4 megs of memory buffer on the cdr. It keeps the data rate smooth flowing, and i haven't had any problems burning from dvd drive to cdr. I can't complain. It is also recommended that you close everything else when you are burning your cds. I said what the heck and left some stuff running. Albeit MIRC and my Worldnet connection aren't too memory intensive, but all my friends who have cdrs quit out and disappear while they burn their cds. I can stay and chat and do something instead of staring at the screen waiting.
What else??
It's ATAPI4 or UDMA33. That means that it won't slow down the other devices on the same channel (drive cable). Even better than the ATAPI4 support is that it's an EIDE cdr. All my friends told me that EIDE cdrs suck, that i am better off getting a scssi card and scssi cdr. They are more stable. But i have not had one bad burn yet, and I didn't have to pay another $100 for a scssi card that takes up another pci slot. SCSSI drives are also more expensive. Again, I can't complain.
Installation:
a breeze, I have win98 se2 and it recognized it right away, software install was a breeze. I have an Awe64 Gold sound card and it has multiple audio inputs from cd drives which is nice, i am not sure if all cards have that feature, they probably do these days. So I didn't have any problems hooking both drives up for sound support. Only thing is that it didn't come with a cd audio cable (most sound cards do) but if you have more than one drive you might fall short. My DXR2 dvd kit came with extras though and my sound card might have also, i am not sure where the cable came from, all i know is i had enough. Again no complaints.
Software:
It came with a nice software selection between plextor's own manager and Adaptec software. The software is simple to setup, pretty self explanatory, and easy to use. The Adaptec software also has a neat drag and drop support for the drive, so if you have a cdr or rw(here's where they will come in real handy) you can use it as another storage drive.
Summation:
I can't say enough praise for this drive. The price was phenomenal when you consider how much a scssi drive would cost, and performance is superb. Everything about this drive is great, i love it. There is one bad thing about it though: It's turning me into a burning junkie! I want to burn stuff not because i need it, but because my drive rules so much!! not good! need help!
*note*
I was cleaning house and came to this review I wrote almost a year to go to date. In that time I have burnt 5 coasters, none of wich were the drives fault. I accidently started burning one at 4x and didn't feel like waiting so I killed it. I had a hard drive go on me and crash my system while burning a couple of times. The other 2 were the fact that my DVD drive needed cleaning after a few years of chugging away and wasn't able to extract the data fast enough for the Plextor anymore ( i retested the drive with the software and it couldn't read stabily faster than 6x till after I cleaned it).
Drive goes for about $160 now.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Turin
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Reviews written: 77
Trusted by: 63 members
About Me:
23 year old Computer Technician/Network Admin into Games, Music, and of course Computers.
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