Transferspeed performance:

Now the first thing we are going to test is the reading performance. Plextor has always been known as a very good reader. But as the writing speed keeps increasing we don't see any change in the reading speed. And especially now that the competition has increased the reading speed to 48x. Is it that much of a difference ?

We are going to try to figure this all out and let you know wether Plextor can keep up with the competition....

Before we are going to continue we must say that 48x reading is always faster than 40x reading so comparison with such a drive would not be fair. Now I can already tell you that the higher reading factor of the competition isn't going to decrease the value of the Plextor.You will see this in the tests.

Now reading a CD isn't always just about speed. Who wants a cdr that was read a littlebit faster but shows plenty more faults than the one read with your Plextor. And what if I tell you that this particular Plextor can read almost anything. Sounds interesting, doesn't it ?

More about this later....

First we are going to do a normal CD-reading test. To do this we are going to take 3 CD-speed benchmark programs. The first to use is Transferspeed.

Our testmachine:

Asus CUSL2 Motherboard

Intel PIII1000

Harddisc Maxtor 30GB ATA 66

384MB PC133 SDRAM

Hercules Phrophet 4500 VGA kaart met 64MB.

Plextor 401040A

Speed test:

For our first test we took a CD-Rom benchmark-Utility to measure the drive's speed. Transferspeed is developed by Smart Projects (Peter Van Hoof) and is freeware. Transferspeed is downloadable at the Smart Projects homesite.

Transferspeedtest:

The Plextor PX-4010A with firmware V1.00

As we can see the reading speed isn't improved that much. The only difference is that this new Plextor is better tuned and thus having a slightly better performance than the older 24x.

The test CD we used to make this test is F-22 LighningIII from Novalogic. It is a PC-data CD of 77min55sec orl 684MB without any real protection. Just a routine that check's wether the CD is in the drive and an Illegal TOC (table of contents).

Average KB/sec test: The average amount of data that is being read in KB/sec. The higher the better.

Average speed according to factor X: The average reading speed of the CD-drive according to factor X The higher the better.

Highest measured speed according to factor X: The higher the better.

Highest measured Single Command Burst according to factor X: the average amount of data that is being read per second in the burst-mode. The higher the better.

Conclusion Transferspeed:

The PX-401040A is a very good data-reader, and thus can act as a full CD-reading station. Above average transferspeeds and reliable reading.

We used for this test a PX-401040A with firmware V1.00 and V1.01 and there was no significant differce due to the firmware-update -A perfect drive stays a perfect drive ain't it ?

Software: PlexTools

Nero CD Speed & CDDV Benchmark

Want to submit your own review? Click here

Reactions on this item

Posted by 123456789 on Monday 22 April 2002 21:28

We would like to see an option to switch poweRecII off in order to try and burn at 40x regardless the media

This is NOT negative, it's a precaution.
Why switch something off that is a great help for the right burning speed.

So it's a 100% score!!

Posted by roadworker on Monday 22 April 2002 22:29

Nice review....

Just 1 thing to add:it's obvious that the reviewer didn't use the best settings to get the quickest reading time for the LiteOn and safedisk 2...
Why?To make the Plex look better???

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 08:59

Heh, and I bought one today before even reading this review. I bought the us version with TLA#0000, firmware 1.00 and made in Feb 2002. I was going to look for anything referring to the firmware flashes and disabling the sd2.5+ backups. There was a rumor(?) about a previous plex burner that supposedly disabled that "feature" and made it so you couldn't reverse flash to a previous firmware version. I want to be sure of this BEFORE I flashed it to whatever the bios is up to now for it. I will go and look for plextools 1.13 tho...

My tests with cdda99b showed it's speed very good but it had to slow itself down a few times. CDSpeed tho, gave a constant reading. Plus I tried a brand new pressed music cd I got about a week ago (the first one was a few months old so it might of been dirty or something) and the results were great! I'll post some of the cd speed results shortly...

Posted by louiskhorweiwu on Tuesday 23 April 2002 15:18

any chance you did tests for reading damaged discs? scratched etc? very useful and was in other reviews, hope it gets included/ kept in mind for future reviews...

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:21

Before I read louiskhorweiwu's reply, I was already going to test the plex to see if it could read a scratched disc better than my previous drives. Those were a TDK VeloCD 12x10x32 which was one of the earlier models that was a repacked plex and a Pioneer dvdrom dvd-104 slot drive. Both of those drives could not read that disc without reporting errors. The plex 40x went through it fine, although not screaming through it like it normally does. Here's the clonecd log of the cd in question. The cd was "on the floor at the boutique: mixed by fatboy slim." It's a 2 session disc with audio and a video. I'm running a test on a really bad data cdr that someone gave me to try and read that looked like it was dropped on the asphalt outside. It used to be guarenteed to lock up the box anytime you put it in. Clonecd is running pretty slow but it's not locking up the pc yet. I'll post those results when they are finished.

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:22

I 3:01:34 PM CloneCD Version 3.3.4.1 started!
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyCDIO Driver 3.3.3.1
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyCDIO.dll 3.3.4.1
I 3:01:34 PM CCDDriver.dll 3.3.4.1
I 3:01:34 PM ElbyECC.dll 3.1.0.0
I 3:01:34 PM Searching for SCSI/ATAPI devices...
I 3:01:34 PM Device Scan found 1 CD-ROMs and 1 CD-Writers!
I 3:01:34 PM Registered to:
I 3:02:24 PM Starting copy from PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4012A to H:My

Musicfatboy.ccd
I 3:02:24 PM Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: No
I 3:02:24 PM Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 3:02:24 PM Fast Error Skip: No
I 3:02:24 PM Don't report read errors: No
I 3:02:24 PM Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: No
I 3:02:24 PM CD contains CD-Text: No
I 3:02:24 PM Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-12512)
I 3:02:47 PM Reading Track 2... (Blocks 12512-28571)
I 3:03:14 PM Reading Track 3... (Blocks 28571-37890)
I 3:03:29 PM Reading Track 4... (Blocks 37890-52144)
I 3:03:53 PM Reading Track 5... (Blocks 52144-63512)
I 3:04:12 PM Reading Track 6... (Blocks 63512-83852)
I 3:04:46 PM Reading Track 7... (Blocks 83852-99550)
I 3:05:12 PM Reading Track 8... (Blocks 99550-120409)
I 3:05:47 PM Reading Track 9... (Blocks 120409-141819)
I 3:06:22 PM Reading Track 10... (Blocks 141819-155740)
I 3:06:46 PM Reading Track 11... (Blocks 155740-169389)
I 3:07:08 PM Reading Track 12... (Blocks 169389-187623)
I 3:07:39 PM Reading Track 13... (Blocks 187623-198718)
I 3:07:57 PM Reading Track 14... (Blocks 198718-209953)
I 3:08:16 PM Reading Track 15... (Blocks 209953-229028)
I 3:08:48 PM Reading Track 16... (Blocks 229028-244683)
I 3:09:14 PM Reading Track 17... (Blocks 244683-264302)
I 3:09:46 PM Reading Track 18... (Blocks 264302-274862)
I 3:10:04 PM Reading Track 19... (Blocks 274862-302227)
I 3:10:49 PM Duration of operation: 00:08:24
I 3:10:49 PM Reading Track 20... (Blocks 313627-330513)
I 3:10:58 PM Duration of operation: 00:00:08
I 3:10:58 PM Reading finished!

Posted by Fishbutt on Tuesday 23 April 2002 21:29

The way that music cd was scratched was from this...

Look at the inside of a cd jewel case. The tiny "fingers" that are in a circle arrangement that grab onto the hub of the cdrom, that's what scratched it. Apparently, the cd slipped out of the jewel case slightly and it was still 98% shut. The cd hub holder scraped across the surface of the cd pretty good. Good enough to make any audio cd player that it was put into skip alot. As you can see, it went through it without reporting errors! Whoopee! I just saved an old cd that I thought that I'd have to buy another because this one was accidentally damaged!

Posted by lanky on Wednesday 24 April 2002 04:48

The review looses 1 point for a rather obvious error:

On page:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=74&Page=12

I quote:
"The result shows that the PX-W4012TA initially begins the writing at 16x whereas it changes speeds after 6 minutes to 24x and after 16min to 32x an finally after 58min to 40x. The overall average writing speed is 29.88x."

The part:
"initially begins the writing at 16x" is wrong. If you look at the picture it starts at 20x!! Please rectify.

Posted by PieterViljoen on Thursday 25 April 2002 19:38

Note: Please be aware that PlexTools 1.12 (as shipped and downloadable)is NOT compatible with Windows XP! This notice appears on the autorun dialog of the software CD.

Posted by on Thursday 02 May 2002 02:27

Great review , but get the names and serial keys out of the screenshots.

Posted by qbfabar on Thursday 27 June 2002 20:54

Very good review.
Why not include in the audio protected test programs such as Feurio and EAC which have proven even better than Plextools in copying protected audio cds ?

Posted by on Monday 08 July 2002 11:50

NO MOUNT RAINIER??? No mention being made of Mount Rainier support, or lack of it in the review article? Looked at the specs as well on the plextor site, and again no mention of it. Surely this should be a negative point.

Posted by on Thursday 22 August 2002 19:59

I bought one yesterday before reading this review...it definetely blows my old burner away(it burned a whole 700Mb in under 5Min) but Im having trouble burning anything past 80Min or 700Mb still,both with 700Mb media, and 800Mb media...

Posted by on Tuesday 07 January 2003 17:49

http://www.plextor.com/english/news/Mt.%20Rainier.html This is Plextors page on this subject and here it is in a nutshell.
Plextor PX-4012TA and PX4012TU drives are Mt. Rainier 'ready". Once Mt. Rainier is stable, a firmware upgrade will be offered at a later date to make the drives Mt. Rainier compatible. Future Plextor drives will be Mt. Rainier-compatible on release.

This review was very helpful I give it a 99%

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