 |
| Installation
and Software |
|
Plextor's bundle is strong but we
would rather Nero's software |
|
Plextor includes a well rounded bundle of CD
Burning software from what is now
Roxio Corp product. Formerly from
Adaptec, Easy CD Creator 5 Basic is the CD
Authoring Software of choice for Plextor.
Roxio CD Creator 5 and Direct CD
These are certainly
full featured and useful utilities for setting
up and burning CDs to your hearts content.
Direct CD specifically allows you to format a CD
for drag and drop addition of data, like any
standard removable drive. Once you are
though adding files, just eject the CD and
before the tray pops out, you are prompted with
a dialog box that asks you how you would like to
close the session. You can then leave the CD
open for future burning and set it up to be
recognizable on any standard CD drive.
Roxio CD Creator 5 Music Compilation
CD Creator 5 will allow you to simply copy from
a CD to a CD-R or allow you to plan and layout
your data or music, within its CD Project mode.
The user interface is simple and intuitive.
It also does a nice job of letting you know how
much room you have left on your recordable, as
well as letting you shift the order of files or
tracks. However, all told we prefer Ahead
Software's Nero Burning ROM software suite, for
its overall improved stability and ease of use.
Regardless, the Roxio suite that Plextor bundles
in, is no slouch either.
|
| Hot
Hardware's Test System |
|
Mid
range Pentium 4 performance |
|
- Pentium 4 1.5GHz. Processor
- Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard
-
256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,
-
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
-
nVidia GeForce 3 64MB AGP Graphics Card,
-
Intel 100tx PCI NIC, 56K PCI Modem
-
Sound Blaster Live Sound Card,
-
Pioneer 10X/40X DVD/CD ROM Drive,
-
Plextor 24/10/40A CD-RW Drive
-
Plextor 16/10/40A CD-RW Drive
-
Windows 2000 Professional SP2
-
Direct X 8.0a and nVidia reference drivers
version 21.80
- Intel chipset drivers version 3.029
|
| Benchmarks
with The PlexWriter 24/10/40A |
|
Simple
read performance |
|
The
first area we'll look at is the read performance
of this drive. SiSoft Sandra will give us
a baseline metric versus our Pioneer DVD-104S
drive.
Pioneer 10X DVD / 40X
CD
Plextore PlexWriter 24/10/40A
Here the 24X
Burner/40X CD-ROM from Plextor rivals a 10X
DVD/40X CD-ROM drive from Pioneer. We know
this Pioneer drive has solid middle of the pack
performance and Sandra shows it running at an
average of 21X speed across the disc. The
Plextor 24/10/40A manages to pull off 22X
performance, just edging out the Pioneer 40X
drive.
Sandra scores only
tell a fraction of the story however.
Let's look into things a little more.
| 
