The Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40A CD-RW Drive
The perennial CD Burn King steps it up a notch

10/8/01 - By  Dave Altavilla

Installation of this drive couldn't be easier.  As with any CD drive, there are several connectors to consider during installation.  A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, so we'll just point you to the wiring diagram from our PlexWriter 16/10/40A article, since it shows exactly the same hook up scheme.

Click image for full view

 

 
Installation and Software
Plextor's bundle is strong but we would rather Nero's software

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

Roxio CD Creator 5 and Direct CD
   

These are certainly full featured and useful utilities for setting up and burning CDs to your hearts content.  Direct CD specifically allows you to format a CD for drag and drop addition of data, like any standard removable drive.  Once you are though adding files, just eject the CD and before the tray pops out, you are prompted with a dialog box that asks you how you would like to close the session.  You can then leave the CD open for future burning and set it up to be recognizable on any standard CD drive.

Roxio CD Creator 5 Music Compilation
 

CD Creator 5 will allow you to simply copy from a CD to a CD-R or allow you to plan and layout your data or music, within its CD Project mode.  The user interface is simple and intuitive.  It also does a nice job of letting you know how much room you have left on your recordable, as well as letting you shift the order of files or tracks.  However, all told we prefer Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM software suite, for its overall improved stability and ease of use.  Regardless, the Roxio suite that Plextor bundles in, is no slouch either.
 

 
Hot Hardware's Test System
Mid range Pentium 4 performance

- Pentium 4 1.5GHz. Processor
- Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard

- 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,

- IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

- nVidia GeForce 3 64MB 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 16/10/40A CD-RW Drive

- Windows 2000 Professional SP2

- Direct X 8.0a and nVidia reference drivers version 21.80

- Intel chipset drivers version 3.029
 

 

Benchmarks  with The PlexWriter 24/10/40A
Simple read performance

The first area we'll look at is the read performance of this drive.  SiSoft Sandra will give us a baseline metric versus our Pioneer DVD-104S drive.

    Pioneer 10X DVD / 40X CD                      Plextore PlexWriter 24/10/40A
                   

Here the 24X Burner/40X CD-ROM from Plextor rivals a 10X DVD/40X CD-ROM drive from Pioneer.  We know this Pioneer drive has solid middle of the pack performance and Sandra shows it running at an average of 21X speed across the disc.  The Plextor 24/10/40A manages to pull off 22X performance, just edging out the Pioneer 40X drive.

Sandra scores only tell a fraction of the story however.  Let's look into things a little more.

 


CD Speed, Write/Re-Write Performance and the rating