Plextor PlexWriter 40/12/40A CDRW Drive

3/10/02 - By  Dave Altavilla

We've shown this next pictorial in our last three Plextor CD-RW drive reviews.  At the risk of looking a little Fred Sanford-like, we'll recycle it for you here, since it is an excellent diagram of how one of these drives (or just about any CD drive for that matter) is hooked up inside your PC case.

Click image for full view

If a picture says a thousand words and you only need about a dozen or so to get the job done, I would say that just about covers the physical setup of this drive.  Let's look at some of the software.
 

Installation and Software Roxio's CD-Creator is looking up!

Plextor includes a well rounded bundle of CD Burning software from what is now known as Roxio Corp .  Formerly from Adaptec, Easy CD Creator 5 Basic is the CD Authoring Software of choice for Plextor.

Roxio's Project Selector, CD-Creator and Direct CD
Click images for full view
   

Third party applications -   Click N' Design 3D Lable Maker and Liquid Player

In addition to the Roxio burning software you also get a couple of fairly interesting trial applications from Liquid Software and Stomp Inc.  Click-N Design is a CD label creation program and Liquid Player is a multi-format audio player, ripping and creation program.  Click-N Design is just trial version and Liquid player is a fully usable "lite" version.  Both of these are fairly useful tools but we were hoping to have full registerable versions of each.  However, many of these features, including CD label creation can also be found in the full Roxio CD Creator suite that is included.
 

Hot Hardware's Test System Northwood driven

- Pentium 4 2.2GHz. NorthwoodProcessor
- Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard

- 512MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,

- IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

- nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 128MB 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 40/12/40A CD-RW Drive

- Windows XP Professional

- Direct X 8.1 and nVidia reference drivers version 27.50
 

CD-ROM Read Performance - PlexWriter 40/12/40A Read performance with Nero CDSpeed

The first numbers we will show you are CD-ROM read performance with Ahead Software's Nero CDSpeed.

Both Plextor drives actually beat out the Pioneer 10X DVD / 40X CD drive, by a small margin.  What was somewhat interesting, although we are not completely confident with the results data, was the fact that in 1X mode, the 40/12/40A Plextor unit actually consumed about 14% CPU utilization versus its 24X brethren.  We're not sure if this was an anomaly with the benchmark software or if this is typical with the new 40X Plextor unit.  Regardless, the overall performance of this new CD-RW drive, when reading at 40X, is very comparable to the 24X Plextor unit.

Let's turn up the heat.

DAE, Media  Performance Variations, Write and Re-write Performance