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We're almost done with our Plextor PX-S2410TU review and for our last tests we're going to check if the drive can read and write exotic CD-Recordable's. These include 99 minute discs and 8cm discs. Let's start with the first one:

Overburning:

We used DataTrack 99min/900MB CD-R's for our tests that were certified up to 40X writing. We used Nero CD Speed to do an overburn test. We set the 'Test capacity' to 99 minutes and started the test. You can see the achieved results below:

As you can see from the results, Nero CD Speed reports that the Plextor drive can overburn to more than 99 minutes! So writing isn't going to be a problem but can the drive also read the 99 minute media:

In the graph you can see that the lines suddenly stop at the 92 minute mark. Although the drive read the disc fine up to this point, it could not read more than that. We of course also simply tried to copy all the data from the 99 minute disc to our hard disk using the Windows explorer but this resulted in the Plextor drive making some weird noises and an error. Reading 99 minute media is thus not possible...

The results we got were pretty weird: so the drive can write 99 minutes of data but cannot read it? That really doesn't make any sense. To test the Plextor's ability to write 99 minute discs we set up a compilation of 97 minutes (859 MB) using Nero Burning Rom, enabled overburning and started the write process. We selected a low write speed of 10X just to be safe:

As you can see the process failed! So we decreased the compilation size to just under 90 minutes (788 MB). Let's check again:

As you can see the process was now completed successfully. In conclusion we can thus say that the PX-S2410TU cannot overburn to 99 minutes and is probably limited to about 92 minutes.

8cm CD-R Tests:

To conclude our Plextor PX-S2410TU review we're going to read and write an 8cm disc. The 8cm discs we're using were manufactured by Plasmon. The discs can hold a maximum of 23min/200MB and were certified up to 12X writing. Here's the ATIP information and a picture of the disc itself:

ATIP: 97m 27s 19f Disc Manufacturer: Plasmon Data Systems, Ltd. Reflective layer: Dye (Short strategy) Media type: CD-Recordable Nominal Capacity: 201.86MB (23m 00s 00f / LBA: 103350)

We first created a data compilation of about 200 MB. We started the write process at maximum speed but to our surprise the burn process failed. To check if this was due to the speed we lowered the write speed to 10X and as you can see from the screenshot below the process failed again:

As a final test we decreased the compilation size a little and wrote at the lowest speed possible, 4X. Again the burn process failed! The weird thing was that when we checked the burned 8cm disc with a Lite-On LTR-52246S drive, the disc was read just fine without a single error:

So we're not sure if the problem with the 8cm disc was due to the Plextor drive, the Nero Burning Rom software or the disc itself. Unfortunately we only had one brand of 8cm discs so we were unable to test other brands. Next we tried reading the burned 8cm disc using the Plextor drive. From the Nero CD Speed graph below you can see that this was again no problem. The disc was read at a constant 8X: