detail information

First things first as we check out the contents of the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive. In the box Plextor Europe send to us we find the following things:

• The Plextor PX-W4824TU drive itself
• Quick installation guide
• Warranty RMA procedure manual
• USB 2.0 connection cable
• External 12V power adapter
• 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 v1.16A disc including 16-language
  manual and USB 2.0 driver for Windows 98SE
• Five (!) blank 48X 700MB Plextor CD-R's
  (manufactured by Taiyo Yuden*)
• One blank 24X 650MB Plextor CD-RW
  (manufactured by unknown company*)

As we already saw with the Plextor PX-W4824A package the external model has the same generous amount of five 48X CD-Recordables. Besides that you get the usual power and USB 2.0 cables. Of course this package does not include any screws or flatcables since the drive is an external model with its own case. An emergency eject pin is also included in the package.

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:

The Plextor PX-W4824TU drive uses the USB 2.0 standard so your computer has to have support for this. Most new motherboards have USB 2.0 ports but many older motherboard do not have this support. Since our motherboard is brand new it has these onboard USB 2.0 ports but if you have an older computer you'll have to install a PCI USB 2.0 card. Luckily these cards aren't very expensive.

Note: It's recommended to attach this high-speed Plextor drive to an onboard USB 2.0 port instead of using a PCI card. This is because 48X writing requires 7.2 MB/s and when you're running the drive via a PCI based USB 2.0 card you may experience buffer underruns. We tested this on an older system using a 700MHz CPU with a PCI USB 2.0 card and the maximum speed we could reach was about 43X.

The Plextor drive was attached via the USB cable that was delivered with it. Its power supply comes from the 12V power adapter. When Windows XP is running and the drive is turned on via the switch on the back, it's automatically recognized and ready for use. You don't need additional software to use the drive (well at least not under Windows XP since this Operating System already supports USB 2.0). There's no need to set the drive to DMA mode or anything. Just hit the switch and we're good to go.

The Drive:

As you see from the picture above the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive looks just like the PX-W4012TU drive. It has the same shiny metal casing and a black drive. On the front of the Plextor drive we find 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.

The back of drive has the same switches and connections as found on the PX-W4012TU drive, which basically are all self-explaining:

1. 12V Power Connector
   To connect the device to the power adaptor.
2. USB Port
   To connect the device to the computer with the USB 2.0 cable.
3. Stereo RCA Jacks
   To connect the device to your sound system (audio cables are not included with the drive and the drive will only send direct audio output to the RCA jacks if it's loaded with an audio disc).
4. Power Switch
   Switch to turn the power of the PlexWriter on and off.
5. Selftest Switch
   To use the diagnostic functions of the PlexWriter (the drive can test itself for possible malfunctions).

One small note we forgot to mention in our previous Plextor PX-W4824A review is that the new Plextor models have a belt-driven tray instead of a gear-driven one. This makes less noise when opening the drive's tray. The latest firmware we're using (1.02) even smoothened opening and closing the drive's tray.

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 CD/DVD 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.

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.

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 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 or TU 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 and TU drives 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-W4824TU...