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When we reviewed the internal Plextor PX-W4824A drive we saw that the drive had excellent quality results with Plextor's recommended media but there were some problems with media of lower quality or media that was certified for a low write speed.

To test the Plextor PX-W4824TU's write quality we went to the stores and simply bought the cheapest media we could find. We then used either Nero Burning Rom or CloneCD to write the discs at maximum speed. For each disc we then used Lite-On's C1/C2 error scan program called WSES. This program can accurately scan a disc for errors and it's a better method of checking the write quality then when using Nero CD Speed for instance. For the quality tests we wrote several different CD-Recordable media and then measured the C1/C2 errors from the disc. The created disc was scanned using a Lite-On LTR-48125W drive (WSES only works with Lite-On drives) at 40X reading.

Note: The display scale were using for our error measurement is 60 for C1 and 20 for C2. Please keep this in mind when you, for instance, compare our tests to other reviews. The scales may be different and you can thus not compare the results just by looking at the created graphs!

Introduction:

C1 and C2 errors are not really on a disc. They occur during reading. The more difficult it is for a drive to read a disc, the more errors will occur while reading that disc. A good disc should report low error rates even at high scanning speeds. But don't forget that a bad disc can also have low error rates after burning. A good disc will still report low error rates if you put the disc into direct sunlight, while a bad disc will damage and/or may degrade after some months. The results below are thus not an indication whether or not the used disc is of a good quality. It's merely an indication if the burn process was done properly.

In the figures below you will see a graphical overview of errors occurring during the read process. Please note that every created/burned disc will always have C1 errors. These are errors that are corrected by the drive and they will not effect the disc in a bad way as long as their amount is limited. C2 errors are however very bad for a disc and are harder to read and correct. When there are too many C2 errors present on the disc it means you have bad burned disc and it can't be read in the test drive your using as a reader (a coaster). Although a low amount of C2 errors can still be recovered by the drive, a zero amount of C2 errors is always preferred!

The Tests:

700MB Plextor CD-R80:

These discs were delivered with the Plextor drive and were (of course) certified for 48X recording. Both drives wrote the disc at 48X and as you can see from the graph below the number of C1 errors is low and there are no C2 errors on the disc. A perfect burn done at the maximum speed for both drives:

700MB MMORE CD-R80:

Both drives both wrote the MMORE media at 40X and while it was certified for 32X writing. When we wrote the disc with the internal Plextor drive we had a lot of errors and we had to adjust the display scale for the C1 errors to 600 instead of 60. The external drive created less errors but there were still quite a lot (display scale for C1 is set at 200). The C2 errors you see at the end of the scan were actually a result of a scratch on the disc and thus not caused by the write process:

700MB Hi-Space Metal:

The Hi-Space Metal media produced a rather weird looking graph as you can see below. With the internal Plextor drive we saw about a maximum of 200 C1 errors but the external drive created even more as you can see in the graph below (700). There were even some C2 errors so this is not a good result although the disc was still readable:

650MB Dixons:

• Contents: Data
• Certified Speed: 24X
  
• Write Speed: 32X (3m:06s)
  
• Disc Type, Material: CD-R, Phthalocyanine
  
• ATIP Lead-in: 97m 27s 19f
  
• Nominal Capacity: 654.49MB (74m 30s 00f)
  
• Disc Manufacturer: Plasmon

The cheapest discs we could find were disc manufactured by Plasmon. They were certified for 24X writing and can hold a maximum of 650MB. The Plextor PX-W4824TU drive wrote the discs at 32X and as you can see from the graph below, produced a perfect result:

700MB Discplanet Media:

When we tested the Discplanet media with the external Plextor drive we got a result that wasn't too good. Although the disc had far less C1 errors (maximum of 180) than we saw with the internal model (maximum of 1200) there were still quite a lot as you can see in the graph below. Luckily there were no C2 errors:

Conclusion:

When we reviewed the internal Plextor PX-W4824A drive with firmware 1.00 we got some mixed results. When we used quality media, recommended by Plextor, the results were good but when we used other (lower quality?) media the number of C1 errors increased enormously. With the external drive the results were about the same. Although some cheap media was written perfectly we saw some problems with other media. We can therefore give you the same advice as we did with our previous review: stick to recommended media to get reliable results!

Now that we've finished our read, write and quality tests, it's time to test the drive for its ability to read and write data and audio copy-protections.