PlexWriter 4/12
Written: Mar 09 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nothing better, or even close
Cons: Quality costs extra
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| sbonds's Full Review: Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-RW Burner |
The PlexWriter 4/12 has been completely solid and reliable, as I've come to expect from Plextor. No other component in my computer is so far ahead of their competition as Plextor is from theirs. Even quality manufacturers such as HP, NEC, Sony, and Toshiba get pummelled when compared to the performance and reliability of Plextor drives.
When writing, I consistently get 590-610K/s, which matches the rated 4x perfectly. The gargantuan 2MB hardware cache is a must when using Windows for burning CDs. There's no way to tell when it will decide to "optimize application load times" in the middle of a burning session. On a drive with only 512K of cache, the CD-R would be ruined. On the Plextor, there's a good chance for survival.
This drive is MMC compatible, which means 'cdwrite' for linux works great with it. As with any SCSI CD-ROM in linux, duplication is a simple matter of "dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/lots-of-space/cdrom.img" to read the file, and "cdwrite /lots-of-space/cdrom.img" to write it out. This is a binary copy so it can be a Mac disk, UNIX disk, PC/Win, Amiga, etc. and it will be copied perfectly.
CDDA (audio) disks are bit trickier, but all Plextor drives can read audio at their minimum rated speed-- even my lowly old 4Plex. Unlike other drives which require the contortions of the "cdparanoia" utility and massive re-reads to line up tracks, Plextors can read full speed straight through. The only real problem is ensuring that your hard disk can keep up so the drive doesn't lose its place. I strongly recommend using a RAMdisk as the destination when reading audio-- it's far more reliable.
I've had only one coaster out of hundreds of CDs created, and that was when one of my hard disks died in the middle of a burning session, causing a SCSI bus reset. I can't really blame the Plextor for that.
I only wish every component in my PC could be made this well.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
sbonds
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Member: Steve Bonds
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 0 members
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