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Posted by Dennis
Posted on 23/05/04 13:40
Number of views 10151
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Introduction
 

  Review: Plextor PX-712A (IDE)
Reviewer: Dennis
Provided by: Plextor Europe
Firmware: version 1.01
Manufactured: April 2004
TLA: #0001

The Plextor brand name is a well known name in the optical storage industry. The company has been active in this industry for years and has built up a good reputation with their CD-ROM and CD-RW drives. Since January of last year Plextor has begun to produce DVD writers too. Their first drive was the Plextor PX-504A, a drive that supported the DVD+R/RW format only.

About seven months later Plextor launched their second DVD recorder, the PX-708A, which supported both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW. This drive was and still is a big success, partially because it was the world's first DVD recorder to support 8x DVD+R recording.

Last month Plextor launched their third DVD recorder, the Plextor PX-712A, at which we're going to take a look at in this review. As the model number of the drive suggests, it supports 12x DVD+R recording speeds, a world's first. Besides this high recording speed for DVD+R the Plextor PX-712A supports other high recording speeds such as 8x DVD-R, 4x DVD±RW, 48x CD-R (which is another world's first for a DVD recorder) and 24x CD-RW. The drive can of course also be used to read media with and it does so at up to 16x for DVD-ROM media and up to 48x for CD-ROM media.

These specifications sound impressive, especially when you keep in mind that the Plextor PX-712A is Plextor's second drive (besides the PlexWriter Premium) to support advanced technologies such as SecuRec (create password protected CDs), GigaRec (record up to 1GB on a standard 700MB CD-R) and Q-Check (advanced error measurement tests). We'll of course get back to these technologies later on in this review. But first, let's start with some general information of our review system.

Test Machine:


For the tests we'll be using the following configuration:

Hardware:
System set-up:

The Plextor DVD recorder was hooked up as Master to the secondary IDE-controller and identifies itself as "PLEXTOR DVDR PX-712A". DMA (Direct Memory Access) and autorun were enabled for every device.

Used Software:


The Dutch Windows XP Professional SP1 operating system is installed on our test machine. We'll be using the following software to perform the various tests:

On the next page of our review we'll take a look at the drive's package, the drive itself and its specifications and features.
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