CD, DVD & Blue-Ray

Plextor PlexWriter Premium CD Burner

By Miguel Blanco ⋅ April 30, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The 52|32|52 Plextor Plexwriter Premium looks deceivingly similar to many of the CD burners out there. It sports the standard bone color chassis, with a standard eject button, headphone jack, and volume control on the front panel. What makes the PlexWriter really stand apart is the ability to control just about every aspect of the burning process. The CD-R included with the drive installs all sorts of goodies including Roxio Easy CD Creator and something called PlexTools Professional.

PlexTools Professional is designed to give you total control over the PlexWriter settings. It sits as a little icon in your system tray until you’re ready to use it. If you choose to never use it, that’s fine too. Your PlexWriter will work like a standard CD Burner with the easy-to-use Easy CD Creator software. But, if you want more control just double click that icon to configure your drive.

With PlexTools you can change all those settings which are hard-coded into many competing devices. Things such as spindown time, stereo output levels, & direct memory access registry settings. You can even change the power settings of the laser when burning discs, although I’m not entirely sure why you would want to. They almost give you too much control. In fact, some screens trigger a pop-up warning you that if you don’t know what you’re doing you could damage the disc and/or drive. Ouch, scary.

There are so many features on the PlexWriter that is difficult to fit them all in this review. Silent Mode quiets up your drive by altering spin settings and tray eject speed. It really works too. A feature called SecuRec allows you to create password-protected CD-Rs. This is a great solution for those who want to backup and store sensitive data, but are afraid of copies falling into the wrong hands.

GigaRec is a huge selling point for the PlexWriter. GigaRec gives you the ability to squeeze mores stuff onto a standard compact disc. I was able to get over 1 Gig of stuff onto a standard generic CD-R. Great feature for backing up files, but the discs you create with this feature enabled may not work properly on any other drive other than the PlexWriter. Looks like technology has surpassed the red book standard.

If you are tech geek, you’ll appreciate that PlexTools allows you to test the reading/writing speed of your drives. You can even perform C1/C2, FE/TE, and Beta/Jitter tests if that’s the sort of thing you fancy. And when we say “drives” we mean all your drives, not just the PlexWriter. This is a great tool for comparing how much better your Plexwriter performs against that older drive you have there.

The PlexWriter comes with Buffer Underun protection making it almost impossible for your computer to mess up a disc during the burning process. I remember the days when 3 out of 5 discs would end up as coasters because of my underpowered desktop. Back then CD-Rs were substantially more expensive making this experience all the more painful. In any case, you can still end up with coasters with the PlexWriter, but only if you start playing with all those scary settings we told you not to touch.

Product SpecificationsInterface: E-IDE (ATAPI)
CD-R Write Speed: 52X
CD-RW Rewrite Speed: 32X
CD-ROM Read Speed: 52X
Buffer: 8MB
Average CD Random Access: <65 ms
Writing Modes: Disc-at-Once, Track-at-Once, Session-at-Once, Multisession, Fixed and Variable Packet Writing
CD Formats Supported: CD-DA, CD-Extra, CD-ROM Mode 1, Mix Mode CD, CD-ROM XA, Photo CD, Video CD, Multisession, CD Text, CD+G, UDF, CD-I
Recording Modes: Disc-at-Once, Track-at-Once, Session-at-Once, Multisession, Fixed and Variable Packet Writing and Mt. Rainer support
Dimensions (W/H/D): 5.75 in x 1.63 in x 7.48 in
Weight: 2.21 lbs

Requirements

CPU: Pentium® II 300MHz or above
RAM: 64MB
HDD: 1GB free space for writing in CD to Image mode
ATAPI interface: DMA must be set to ON in every OS. How to enable DMA inside operating system.

Warranty / Other Information

One-year full warranty (parts, labor and replacement)

Conclusion

Overall, this is the most flexible drive we’ve seen yet. The ability to control every setting on the drive, including some settings you may not want to control, make the PlexWriter the perfect choice for mastering engineers and software houses. For the average user, the drive is a high performance workhorse and well worth the US$116 price tag.

Pros:

Ability to control most settings
Ability to create non-standard CD-Rs with over 1 Gig of data
Silent Mode
Drive Testing Tools
Easy CD Creator Included

Cons:

Some settings can cause damage to the disc and/or drive so users must be careful when altering the default settings.

Quality: 10 out of 10
Features: 10 out of 10
Price: 9 out of 10

Overall: 9.7 out of 10