Written By:
Date Posted: May 10, 2001
There are cd writers, then there is Plextor. With the exception of the TDK VeloCD, no other drive comes close to Plextor in terms of speed, quality and overall reliability.
When building my new PC, I was faced with a tough task of what cd writer to purchase. I read positive reviews of the Creative 12/10/32 drive, which is essentially a Plextor in disguise, but I wanted the real deal. I wanted something with Sanyo's Burn-Proof technology (more on that later), so that eliminated about 90% of the drives at my local shop. I considered the SCSI version of the Plextor, but it "only" burned at 12X. The 16/10/40A met my predetermined criteria, and the decision to buy took me about the amount of time walking up to the shelf the Plextor was on.
The drive itself looks like any other IDE burner, with the exception of little cooling fan on back. It's actually a nifty feature to help keep those CDs from catching on fire, but even with the fan, burning CDs at 16x gets a bit toasty. Installation is straightforward,...put drive in, plug in IDE cable, plug in power.
Not wasting anytime, I went to work backing stuff up. Coming from a 4x burner previously, words can't descibe how amazed I was watching 650MB cds popping out in under 6 minutes. I also put the Burn-Proof to the test. For those who don't know, the Burn-Proof technology is designed to avoided the dreaded buffer underruns that turn CDs into coasters. In the good ole days of early 2000, if you're burning a backup CD, and decide to run a virus scan and play a game of Quake, you'll likely have a useless CD, instead of your backup CD. This happens because the buffer that contains the data for the laser, empties because your PC is too busy doing whatever it is doing. The laser fires zero data, and BAM! Coaster. Burn-Proof, in a nutshell, can pause this laser, and wait for the buffer to fill up again. When this happens, the laser tracks to where it left off and continues the burn. Does it work? You bet. I ran a disk defrag on the very drive I was backing up, and though the burn time took 7 minutes, I got a perfect CD. I doubt this will work if you reboot or delete data off the drive you're burning, but I doubt anyone would do that, especially since I've been hearing that CDRs are going up by 300% during 2001.
Two complaints I have though. One, out of habit, I tend to select DMA in Device Manager of all my drives. After the standard reboot, my Plextor had all kinds of problems reading CDs. I read online that this is an issue, and you need to deselect DMA. Another gripe I have is the software. EZCDC 4.0 is good software, but getting kind of old. EZCDC 5.0 would have been nice, but I'm guessing it wasn't out yet. Nero 5.0 was though, and I think for the money this drive costs, they should include a whole suite of software tailored to specific needs.
Still, this drive is miles ahead of the competition, and light years ahead of what I owned previously. Know this though, when you buy a Plextor drive, you'll be buying the best there is.
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