 |
| Head-to-Head
vrs. Plextor's Legacy 16/10/40A |
|
Is 24X that much faster? It sure
seems to be. |
|
Our choice of
benchmarking software was
Ahead Software's Nero Burning ROM utility.
It provides a simple interface with timed
outputs.
Ahead Software
Nero Burning ROM
From left to right: 10X CD-RW, 24X CD-R
and 24X CD-R Disc Copy
Perhaps you were
quick and could do the math from the times
above. We decided to make it easy on you
however and compare performance of this new 24X
burner to Plextor's 16X model.
Knocking nearly a
full two minutes off from a full 650MB burn, the
24/10/40A shows superb performance pulling data
off the hard drive and restoring it to the CD-R.
A burn of 650MB in four minutes, makes short
work of a full CD's worth of data.
For some reason, in
our Disc 2 Disc Copy test, the Plextor 24X drive
widens the gap even further versus the legacy
16X Plextor unit. Not to mention the fact
that with the 24/10/40A, there was negligible
difference in performance when copying from a
CD-ROM drive or from the Hard Drive. It
literally took only 4 additional seconds to burn
disc to disc, versus the 4 minute flat score in
the CD-R from hard drive test.
Finalizing our testing, we have the same 650MB
session being burned to a CD-RW disc, in an
effort to show the 10X CD-RW performance of the
new 24/10/40A.
Here things haven't
changed much for the Plextor 24X burner.
It does beat out the 16X Plextor drive by a
small 18 second margin. On the other hand,
for some folks, every second counts. 
This overview and
assessment of Plextor's latest Flagship CD-RW
drive, almost seems like a repeat. As was the
case when we first tested their 16/10/40A drive,
we were more than impressed with the performance
and quality of Plextor's new 24/10/40A.
Throughout testing, the drive exceeded our
expectations on every level, from simple reads,
to DAE to doing what it does best, burning CD-Rs
at blinding speed. During our testing we
used a variety of media from 12X ready CD-Rs to
24X compatible discs from PNY. Never once
were we given the gift of coaster. Not
only were we coaster-less throughout testing but
we even stressed the machine now and then by
firing up an email client or word processing
application. Burn Proof held true to form,
allowing us decent control over the system even
though heavily taxed in the middle of a write
session. The
Heat Meter rarely reaches this high at Hot
Hardware but Plextor has done it AGAIN. 
This
product easily has garnered our coveted "EC
Award"... 
You
have something meaningful to say or do you just
want to flap your gums? Get some in the
Hot Hardware Conference Room now! |
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