Excellent CDRW for great price!
Written: Jan 26 '00 (Updated Jan 26 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good price, quality drive, many features
Cons: ide and not scsi
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| akel's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Burner |
Plextor's latest addition to its family of quality CDRW drives is the PlexWriter 8/4/32. This is also their first IDE drive. Being an IDE drive, it is priced significantly lower than some of their previous SCSI drives. It writes at a nice 8x, rewrites at 4x, and reads at 32x. The retail version comes with software such as the Plextor Manager 2000 and Adaptec's Easy CD 3.5. If you do purchase this drive, make SURE you go to Plextor's homepage at www.plextor.com and download the firmware and Plextor Manager 2000 updates. They have a lot of bugfixes. Setting up the drive for use is a snap since it is plug and play. Just connect the drive onto an IDE cable, boot up, and you're ready to go.
When I was doing my research on buying a CDRW, I planned on buying the Yamaha 8/4/24, which is a good drive. Then I learned about the Plextor 8/4/32. Being Plextor, I decided to buy it instead. Plextor is well known for its products being stable and reliable.
As for price, you'll find the Plextor 8/4/32 priced at a comfortable range. I purchased mine for $227 in January 2000, which is a pretty good deal for a Plextor IDE CDRW which burns at 8x. If you look for it on www.pricewatch.com, you can keep up with the latest pricings on it.
Considering software, I have found Easy CD 3.5 to be quite reliable. Data and audio burns both work great. However, there is now an Easy CD 4.0 available which you may wish to purchase (from www.adaptec.com). Software such as Nero (www.ahead.de) and cdrwin (www.goldenhawk.com) have given me burn problems a couple of times, but that may be because the drive is not yet fully supported by the two pieces of software.
Remember that this is and IDE drive, and has the same characteristics of other IDE drives. It will take up a lot of resources during burns, so you can't do a whole lot while burning. However, 8x writing makes burning a whole cd possible in about 9 minutes. SCSI burners are also known to have better insurance against bad burns. However, this drive burns data and audio well enough that you should not have to worry about that issue. If you're looking for a very high quality CDRW drive, I would recommend Plextor's SCSI burners. However, these drives are a great bargain considering their price and performance. Anyone one who's interested in getting a good deal on a quality CDRW should definitely look into this drive. The drive's many features such as 170ms access time, a 4MB buffer, and various writing modes, make it a good buy.
Specs on this burner:
170ms Random Access Time
4MB Buffer
Vibration damped motor system
Plug and Play/SCAM compliant
Lower CPU utilization for better PC performance
60,000 hours MTBF
Writes CD-ROM modes 1 & 2, CD-XA Form 1 & 2, CD-DA, CD-I, Video CD, and Photo CD
Creates Audio, CD Plus, Enhanced CD, DOS, MAC, UNIX, Photo CD, CD-I and Video CD titles
Supports Disk-At-Once, Track-At-Once, Multisession and Packet writing modes
Low power consumption
Front panel audio controls and headphone jack
Media security via hardware or software
1 year warranty
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
akel
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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