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Besides supporting the world's highest DVD+R recording speed the Plextor PX-708A is also one of the first drives to support 4x DVD+RW recording. Other re-write speeds the drive supports are 2x DVD-RW recording and 24x CD-RW. On this page of our review we'll see what these speeds mean when writing normal data compilations and when using the packet writing method.

Note that we unfortunately were unable to find DVD-RW media that would work at 2x in the Plextor PX-708A drive. However, please also note that at the time of writing this review 4x DVD+RW media is very hard if not impossible to come by. However we were able to obtain some blank 4x DVD+RW discs so we can include our results with this media in our review!

Re-Writing Data:

For our CD-RW data re-writing tests we set up a new compilation of 650MB using the Nero Burning Rom software. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) writing method. In the screenshot below you can see the burn process completed successfully:

As you can see our data compilation was written in 3 minutes and 40 seconds. This is a very good result for a DVD recorder since most other DVD recorders only support 10x or 12x CD-ReWriting. For our next DVD+RW test we set up a new DVD-ROM compilation of about 4.4GB. We again used the DAO writing method and started the write process:

The total compilation was written in 14 minutes and 40 seconds. This recording time is about 9 to 10 minutes shorter than when recording at 2.4x (which is what most DVD+RW drives currently support).

Packet Writing:

For our packet writing tests we used Ahead's InCD 4 software and tested both the Plextor's CD-RW and DVD+RW performance. For our first test we set-up a test folder with random data measuring roughly 400MB in size. After formatting was complete we measured the time it took for the drive to write the test data. In the table below we've summed up our results:

As you can see from the table we got some strange results since the PX-708A drive only reached an average packet writing speed of 9.9x. Since we've seen the problem with other drives before we know this problem is related to InCD v4. This is one of the reasons we normally use InCD v3 for our reviews but unfortunately InCD v3 does not support the Plextor PX-708A drive. As of yet we haven't received a response from Ahead what is causing these slow recording times.

For our next DVD+RW tests we set-up a test folder with random data measuring 4.35GB in size. We then inserted an empty disc and measured the time it took for the drive to format the disc after which the test data was dragged and dropped to the disc via the Windows Explorer. In the table below you can see the results again:

And once again we have a very slow average packet writing speed of only 2.4x. This should normally be around 3.9x for this Plextor drive. Notice that the displayed results for the Sanyo drive were achieved with InCD v3. Let's continue with our Mount Rainier tests.

Mount Rainier:

To test the Plextor Premium's Mount Rainier performance we again used InCD to write the same folder of test data we used for our CD-RW packet writing test. In the table below you can see an overview of the achieved results:

From the table you can see that the Plextor PX-708A drive again needs far too much time to write our test data and it really is too bad that InCD v3 does not support the drive so we can compare the write times of both InCD versions to each other. The write time for the PX-708A drive should be around 4 or 5 minutes but with InCD v4 it's more than 17 minutes...

The Plextor PX-708A drive also supports the DVD+MRW standard but since we're having problems with InCD it's pointless to continue. Hopefully we will be able to figure out what the problem is so we can perhaps fix it and update our review.

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