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The
Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Drive
Turning
and Burning
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| Test
System (Replace with title) |
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this text with a thought or a
note, or simply erase this line. |
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Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium3-500E
overclocked to 600 and 750 MHz. (Provided By OutsideLoop
Computers)
Tyan Trinity 400 VIA Apollo Pro PC133
Motherboard, 128MB of EMS PC133 HSDRAM, WD 18G
7200RPM DMA66 Hard Drive, Elsa
Erazor X2 AGP Card,
Kenwood 72X CDROM, Plextor PlexWriter
8/4/32 CD-RW Drive, Win98SE,
DirectX7, Plextor
Firmware Revision 1.05
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| PlexWriter
Benchmarks |
| Burning
up the tracks... |
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One more
utility that Plextor provides with the drive
is an Audio Capture utility. It lets you
convert audio files to a .WAV format only.
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(click
for a closer look)
As
far as Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) goes,
the PlexWriter 8/4/32 does just OK, extracting
and writing the wave file at 11.6X speed
according to their software. Other read
only drives can accomplish this task faster
but then again they don't write CDs at 8X
either.
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CD
Speed 99
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CD
Speed 99 is a good measure of specific areas of CD
drive performance. Here the read performance
of the drive is put through a battery of tests.
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(click
images for a closer look)
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The
PlexWriter does a nice job here and CD Speed 99
reports it as a 25X Drive on average. It
lived up to it 32X Max specification on the end
tracks. Access times reported were a little
poky compared to the specs for the drive.
This test was done with a Data Disk.
Here
we see the drive having to work for a living, so
to speak, with an Audio Disk loaded in for the
test. Digital Audio extraction was a perfect 10
with no errors. The average speed
reported here is about 17X.
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SiSoft
Sandra CD Benchmark
This
benchmark reports the drive as having the read
performance level of a 16X drive. We
expected to see a little bit more here quite
frankly.
CD
Duplication Tests
Let's
face it folks, the REAL test of a CD Recordable
Drive is Write and Re-Write performance.
So here is a snapshot of the drive doing what it
does best, burning CDs.
As
we expected, this is where the PlexWriter 8/4/32
really shines! It wrote a full CD in
approximately 9 minutes. This is the
fastest recordable drive we have in house
currently, although 12X drives are right around
the corner, so we are told. Re-Writing to
a CD-RW disk was slower of course but in keeping
with the drive's 4X spec.
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Final Remarks and The Rating
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Plextor Plexwriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Drive is a great
new workhorse from a company long known for its
quality and performance in the CD Drive
arena. Its read speed is decent although
somewhat uninspiring. However, its Write
and Re-Write capabilities typify a new level of
performance in CD Recording. Plextor also
goes the distance with a nice complement of
software tools.
All told the
PlexWriter 8/4/32 delivers a solid offering of
features and performance augmented by top end CD
recording. If you measure this drive on
its write performance alone, it is top
notch. As a total package, it should still
satisfy even the performance enthusiast.
We give the
Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 a HotHardware Heat
Meter Rating of....
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TO HOTHARDWARE !! |
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Final Remarks and The Rating
