The Plextor PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A Review
Covering All of the Bases With a Single Drive

By, Jeff Bouton
July 10, 2002

Benchmarks and Comparisons Continued Content Creation 2002 & Business Winstone 2001

Nero CD DAE:

Another important feature to benchmark is a drive's efficiency at Digital Audio Extraction.  For this test we clocked the total time it took to extract the files from a 65:33 audio CD to our hard drive.

Plextor PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A

Pioneer DVD-115

The PleXCombo did a fantastic job of extracting the files to the hard drive, completing the task in 2:19.  The Pioneer DVD-115, on the other hand, took over twice as long, completing a full extraction at 4:42.  When it comes to DAE, the PleXCombo drive really excels. 

Now let's compare the two drives at MP3 encoding.

MP3 Encoding With MusicMatch 7.20:

As we all know, MP3s are enormously popular these days, and why not?  People can now build their own digital song database in a fraction of the size of standard CDA files while maintaining the digital quality of CDs.  One program that we like to use when ripping our own MP3s is MusicMatch.  So we loaded up our test CD, set MusicMatch to record at 320Kbps quality, and recorded the time it took each drive to complete the task.
 

Total Time to Rip 65:33 Long Audio CD

When it comes to MP3 recording, both drives are capable of getting the job done, but the PleXCombo was able to complete the task in less than half the time the Pioneer needed.

Disc Copying With Nero Burning ROM:

The next test we ran was a simple disc copy.  We loaded up a CD with 700MB of data into our source drive and let Nero and the PleXCombo do their thing.  Then we ran the same test with our PlexWriter 40/12/40A to give a frame of reference.

Total Time to Copy a 700MB CD

Burning at the peak speed of 20X, the entire disc was copied in 5:42, that's roughly 2MB a second.  Obviously we're not going to break any speed records with the PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A, but copying a disc on an average of 5 minutes is pretty darn good.

We've got one more test before we wrap things up, Nero DVD Speed.

Nero DVD Speed:

The next utility we ran was Nero DVD Speed, which benchmarks the various DVD-related functions of a DVD-Drive.  Unlike the other tests, however, the results of these two comparisons are not as cut and dried.  After completing a run with both drives, we saw a distinct variation in the way the two drives process DVD movies.  Although the PleXCombo is rated for 12X DVD and the Pioneer for 16X, neither came close to reaching those peaks.  This is more than likely because it simply is not necessary for the drive to burst up to those speeds while playing back a DVD movie.  We believe that the top speeds of these two drives would possibly peak when using a DVD data disk rather than a DVD movie disk.  Unfortunately, we didn't have a DVD data disk on hand to test this theory, so we'll leave it at that.  If you have any input on this, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.  Nonetheless, we can still check out how the two drives handle DVD playback and compare the way the two behave.

Plextor PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A

Pioneer DVD-115

When we look at the PleXCombo, we see that Plextor designed it to maintain a steady 2X output (GREEN) by throttling the RPMs of the disk (YELLOW).  The Pioneer is a little more straightforward, maintaining a steady RPM of the disk, which results in a slope effect starting at 3X, peaking at 8X and completing back at 3X.  Overall, the Pioneer and PleXCombo both produced equal DVD quality with PowerDVD, but the PleXCombo did it more gracefully.  While the argument could be made that the Pioneer was faster in every way compared to the PleXCombo, even using slightly less CPU time, the PleXCombo was certainly more efficient.  The PleXCombo drive is designed to maintain what is needed to provide smooth video playback, the results is a drive that runs at less RPMs and is quieter than the Pioneer drive.  Interestingly, even though the Pioneer had faster overall seek times, the PleXCombo could still matched its peak burst rate of 20MB. 

Don't Try This At Home:

Well, actually...you can if you want.  To help demonstrate the power of BurnProof, we decided to run a little test to see how well it protected us from burning a "coaster."  I think a lot of us remember the day when one had to set up a burn and walk away from the machine until the process completed.  These days, there is very little chance of even burning a coaster at all and we'll prove it.  In this test we cued up Nero to burn a 703MB folder of MP3s, but before we started the burning process we used Norton Speed disk to begin defragmenting the source partition (E:).  Next we fired up TMPGEnc and began converting a DIVX file to MPEG on the same partition while ripping a full album to the source drive at 320Kbps using Music Match 7.2.  We believe this would certainly create conditions where the potential of a failed burn could occur.

As you can see in the screenshot above, we had absolutely no problem burning the full CD in a little more that 5 minutes.  This was a good example of how well BURN-Proof performs.  In fact, there are very few situations that could trigger the creation of a coaster, but there is one in which BURN-Proof could fail.  The only way that we've ever had the opportunity to cause BURN-Proof to fail was when we attempted to burn a very large file.  If you have an AVI file that is over 600MBs, for example, there is virtually no way for the software to buffer a file of that size, in which case we recommend setting up your burn and leaving the system alone to complete its task, otherwise the burn may fail.  Aside from that, BURN-Proof is virtually Bulletproof. 

As with every other Plextor review we've done, we are thoroughly impressed with the PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A.  Plextor has a long tradition of producing drives with exceptional quality and features that are ahead of the curve, and the PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A is worthy of carrying on that tradition.  This is an excellent drive that meets a wide range of needs, from DVD to CD-ROM and CD-R, the PleXCombo is up to the task.  The best part is that the PleXCombo incorporates all the latest technologies that is commonly found in the popular PleXWriter line of CD-R drives, making the only real trade-off the slower write speed.  For the user looking for a high-quality CD/DVD/CD-R combo drive, Plextor has just what you need with the PleXCombo 20/10/40-12A.

We give the Plextor PleXCombo 20/10/40/12A a Hot Hardware Heat Meter Rating of a 9!

Just as Plextor has a tradition of producing exceptional CD drives, we are going to continue the tradition of giving Plextor our coveted HotHardware Editor's Choice Award! 

HotHardware's PC Hardware Forum is all the rage!  Are you in?