detail information

First things first as we check out the contents of the Plextor PX-W4824A package. In the box Plextor Europe send to us we find the following things:

• The Plextor PX-W4824A drive itself
• Quick installation guide
• Warranty RMA procedure manual
• Warranty registration card
• IDE 40-pins flatcable
• Audio cables
• Mounting screws
• Emergency eject pin
• Nero Burning Rom 5.5 disc containing;
  • Ahead's Nero Burning Rom
  • Ahead's NeroMediaPlayer
  • Ahead's InCD
  • Ahead's Nero BurnRights
• PlexTools v1.15 disc including PleXCombo 16-language manual
• Five (!) blank 40X 700MB Plextor CD-R's
  (manufactured by Taiyo Yuden*)
• One blank 24X 650MB Plextor CD-RW
  (manufactured by unknown company*)

As always with Plextor, a very nice and complete package as we see it. The package includes everything you need to have for a quick start and also includes a generous amount of five (48X) CD-Recordable discs. As with other European Plextor drives, this model also includes Nero Burning Rom 5.5 which, as you will know by now, is our personal favourite when it comes to creating your own audio and data compilations. Of course the package comes with mounting screws, connection cables, an emergency eject pin and an extra jumper cap.

The manual of the Plextor drive can be found on the PlexTools disc and is very complete and in many different languages. Plextor has included a printed quick installation guide and a printed manual on how you should proceed when you have problems with your drive. For Europe, The Middle-East and Africa Plextor Europe offers a two year warranty on the drive as they do for all their new writer models.

Installation:

Installation was quick and easy as with most IDE drives. We set the drive's jumper to master and hooked it up to the onboard secondary IDE controller. We then booted the computer and the drive was recognized and ready to be used. UDMA was automatically enabled in Windows XP and set to UDMA Mode 2 (UDMA33).

The Drive:

As you see from the picture above the Plextor PX-W4824A drive looks just like the previous models although its surface is less rough than the previous Plextor models. People owning a Plextor drive will know what we mean.. As you can also see from the picture, the PX-W4824A drive comes in both a grey and a black model. We received the 'classic' grey model.

On the front of the drive we find the PleXWriter logo, the supported speeds (48/24/48), the 'BPRec' (BURN-Proof Recording) logo and the 'Ultra Speed CD ReWriteable' logo. Besides that we have the usual headphone jack, a volume control, a disc/busy LED and of course an eject-button.

One the back of the drive we find the usual IDE and power connectors, the MASTER/SLAVE jumpers and the SPDIF (analog/digital) output connectors. On the back of the drive we can also find an UDMA jumper setting with which you can set the drive to PIO mode 4 instead of UDMA33 it normally uses. We of course left this jumper alone since UDMA33 is by far the best interface.

The Software:

As briefly mentioned when we listed the package contents, this European Plextor drive includes Nero Burning Rom v5.5 which doesn't really need an introduction. Nero Burning Rom, by many people, is considered to be one of the best software packages around when it comes to your burning needs.

Of course Ahead's InCD is also located on the Nero 5.5 CD-ROM. InCD is Ahead's packet writing software to use with your CD-ReWriteable discs. With this software you can format a CD-RW disc and use it as a large floppy disc. InCD now also supports the 'Mount Rainier' (CD-MRW) format which we'll get back to later on in this review when we test the Plextor PX-W4824A's CD-MRW performance (yes this new Plextor drive supports Mount Rainier!).

Other small tools located on the Nero 5.5 CD-ROM are NeroMediaPlayer and, more interesting, Nero BurnRights. Nero BurnRights was designed for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. After Nero BurnRights has been installed, the system administrator can assign a specific group the rights to record CD's/DVD's on the system. If an administrator wants to allow or disallow CD/DVD recording rights for certain users, it is enough to make the user a member of this group or to remove the user from the group. If everybody should have the right to record CD's/DVD's, the recording rights can be assigned to everybody.

Plextor PlexTools is another well known program and is delivered with European Plextor CD-writers. The program has come a long way since its first introduction and now offers some advanced features such as 'DAE Error Recovery' and advanced settings to control your Plextor drive with, which we'll get back to later on in our review:

As you can see from the screenshot some of the advanced settings include enabling or disabling of BURN-Proof, PoweRec, DMA and SpeedRead. But you can also use PlexTools to Hide CD-R Media and to let your Plextor drive only read a single session of a disc. Disabling the PoweRec feature has an interesting extra feature. When you disable the PoweRec function of the Plextor PX-W4824A drive you can force it to write media at the selected speed (e.g. 48X) instead of the speed the recorder would normally use when its quality checks (PoweRec) are enabled. When you disable PoweRec you can see at which speed your media would normally be written and you can thus check which media will be written at 48X! A unique feature for the PX-W4824A drive which, by the way, also works in Nero Burning Rom:

As you can see in the screenshots above the write speed for the inserted media is 48X in this case. When you disable the PoweRec feature of your Plextor drive you will of course create a risk that the disc will be written at a too high speed and it may contain (uncorrectable) errors. For more information on Plextor's PlexTools please read our small review on it.

On the next page we'll take a look at the features the Plextor PX-W4824A...