detail information

As always we're going to start our review by checking out the contents of the retail package Plextor Europe send to us. In the box of the Premium recorder we can find the following items:

• Plextor Premium drive
• Quick installation guide
• Warranty RMA procedure manual
• Warranty registration card
• Mounting screws, emergency eject pin, extra jumper cap
• Ahead Nero 5 Burning Rom disc containing;
  • Nero Burning Rom
  • NeroMediaPlayer
  • InCD
  • EasyWrite Reader
  • Nero BurnRights
• PlexTools Professional v2.02 disc including 16-language manual
• One blank 52x 700MB Plextor CD-R
  (manufactured by Taiyo Yuden*)
• One blank 24x 650MB Plextor US CD-RW
  (manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals*)

As we've come to expect from Plextor they have put together an good package. The drive includes some excellent software such as Nero Burning Rom and the new PlexTools Professional software (to which we'll get back to later in this review). Some items we did miss in the package were an IDE-cable and 32x CD-RW media. The latter is not surprising since no manufacturer has started producing re-writeable discs yet that can handle 32x. So unfortunately we cannot test the Premium drive at 32x re-writing in this review..

The manual of the Plextor drive can be found on the PlexTools Professional disc and is very complete and in no less than sixteen 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.

The Drive:

The PlexWriter Premium drive is of a lighter colour than previous PlexWriter drives and it has the same whitish colour as the PX-504A DVD+RW recorder. On the front of the Premium drive we can find the PlexWriter Premium logo, a BPRec (Burn-Proof Recording) logo and an 'Ultra Speed CD ReWriteable' logo. Besides that we can find a headphone jack, emergency eject hole, a volume control dial and one LED/CD indicator on the front of the drive.

The CD indicator shines green when a CD is loaded, yellow when a CD is being read and orange when it is writing to a CD. The CD indicator blinks orange at three different speeds, depending on the write and re-write speed (CD-R: 4~31x, 32~40x, 41~52x and CD-RW: 4x, 4~10x, 24~32x).

One the back of the Premium drive we find the usual IDE and power connectors, the Master/Slave/CableSelect jumpers, a 4-pin analog audio connector and an SPDIF (Digital Audio Out) connector. On the back of the drive we can also find a fourth jumper setting with which you can set the drive to DMA mode 2 (MultiWord) instead of UDMA33 it normally uses. We of course left this jumper alone since UDMA33 is by far the best interface.

Software:

Plextor's PlexTools software is a well known program and used to be delivered with European Plextor drives. Our American and Japanese friends are in luck since the new PlexTools Professional software is shipped worldwide with the Premium drive. The PlexTools Professional software has some interesting new features on board with which you can do advanced tests using your Premium drive. We'll take a look at these 'Q-Check' functions on the next page of this review.

As we're used from European Plextor drives they're shipped with a copy of Ahead's Nero Burning Rom software. On this disc we can find the famous Nero Burning Rom software which is, by many people, is considered to be one of the best software packages around when it comes to your CD/DVD burning needs.

Ahead's packet writing software InCD is also located on the Nero 5 disc. With InCD you can format a CD-RW or DVD±RW disc and use it as a large floppy disc. InCD also supports the 'Mount Rainier' (CD-MRW) format.

Other tools located on the Nero 5 disc are NeroMediaPlayer, Nero BurnRights (allows an administrator to setup user accounts under Windows XP/2000 so that users without administrative rights can burn CDs with Nero) and EasyWrite Reader (adds Mount Rainier (CD-MRW) read support to a system).

Drive Specifications:

In the Nero InfoTool screenshot below we can see that the Premium drive has an 8MB buffer, firmware 1.01 is installed, reading CD-Text is supported and so is C2 error reporting. The drive also supports the Mount Rainier format.

From the screenshot we can also see that the read speed is detected as 40x. By default the Premium drive will read at a maximum speed of 40x but the drive can be set to 52x reading by enabling the SpeedRead option:

As you can see in the screenshot above the read speed has now been detected as 52x. The SpeedRead option can be enabled via the PlexTools software or manually by opening the drive's tray, making sure it's empty, closing it again and then by pressing and holding the eject-button for three seconds. The option will then be enabled and the Premium drive will be able to read discs at 52x. SpeedRead can be disabled (and thus limiting the read speed again) by pushing the eject-button or by cutting the drive's power.

In the manual that comes with the Premium drive we can read a small warning on using the drive at 52x reading, showing us that Plextor hasn't changed their mind on high read speeds:

Reading CDs at 52x will shorten the device's lifetime and will produce a higher noise level. Furthermore, at this high speed (10.400 rpm at 52x), low quality or scratched CDs could explode in the drive.

In the PlexTools Professional screenshot above we can see that has an average access time of less than 65ms. Let's take a closer look at some of the features that the drive supports:

Drive Features:

Buffer Underrun Protection:

Nero Burning Rom reports us that the Premium drive supports the BURN-Proof (Buffer UnderRuN-Proof) technique. When the, in this case 8MB, buffer of the recorder falls beneath a certain level, it will stop recording as of a specific location on the CD. The recorder then continues attempting to receive data from the PC to refill the buffer. As soon as the buffer has been refilled, the recorder will start recording again.

Mount Rainier:

In the Nero Burning Rom screenshot we can also see that the Premium drive supports the Mount Rainier format. Mount Rainier enables native operating system support of data storage on CD-ReWriteable discs. This makes the technology far easier to use and allows the replacement of the floppy. Key features include:

• Defect management by the drive itself
• Logical write-addressing at 2k
• Background formatting
• Command set implementation
• Compatibility and standards-compliance

For more information you can visit www.mt-rainier.org.

PoweRec:

Like almost all new Plextor drives, the Premium supports the PoweRec technology to ensure a quality back-up. PoweRec (Plextor Optimised Writing Error Reduction Control) monitors the quality of the disc while burning and will adjust the speed if necessary. As you can see from the Nero Burning Rom screenshot PoweRec can be disabled to force the drive to write media at a selected speed instead of the speed the recorder would normally use when its quality checks (PoweRec) are enabled. PoweRec can also be disabled via the PlexTools software. A small benefit of this option is that when you disable PoweRec you can see at which speed your media would normally be written:

VariRec:

The VariRec technology allows you to change the drive's laser power when writing an audio disc. With VariRec enabled you should be able to improve the quality of the recorded disc and make the recorded disc more compatible with picky CD-players like a car stereo. The VariRec function found on the Premium drive has been improved since it now allows 8x writing (previously limited to 4x) and allows you to select the dye type of your CD-R disc in order to select the best write strategy:

GigaRec:

GigaRec is an interesting new technique which allows you to expand the capacity of a normal 80 minute (700MB) CD-R disc up to 111 minutes (or almost 1GB of data). By compressing the pits and lands that are written on the disc, it is possible to increase the capacity of the disc by 40%. At the rate of 1.4x, failure free playback can be achieved on most modern equipment:

The maximum capacity of a disc is dependant on the type of disc and the GigaRec rate. When activated the recording speed will be limited to 4x in DAO (Disc At Once) mode on CD-R media without BURN-Proof.

Silent Mode:

The Silent Mode option in the PlexTools software allows you to change various settings of your Premium drive in order to get a noise-free or silent operation:

SecuRec:

The SecuRec technique allows you to password protect a CD-R disc when recording in DAO mode. When SecuRec is activated, the data on the written disc can only be retrieved by supplying the password you entered when the disc was written:

Writing and reading of a SecuRec protected disc can only be done with the Premium drive. When the data has to be accessed from a different drive or computer you can use the free SecuViewer software and the original password:

When someone tries to read the disc in another drive without using the PlexTools or SecuViewer software, Windows XP will display the following error message:

Disc is not formatted

Windows cannot read from the disk. The disk might be corrupted, or it could be using a format that is not compatible with Windows.

Q-Check:

The PlexTools Professional software also allows us to do some more advanced tests using the Premium drive. These so-called Q-Check tests, consisting of a C1/C2 Test, a FE/TE Test and a Beta/Jitter Test, will be looked at on the next page of this review.

Write Methods:

Let's take a look at the Premium's write performance when using Nero CD Speed. We've also taken a look at the drive's re-write performance but, as said before, due to a lack of 32x CD-RW media these tests were done with 24x CD-RW media:

CD-Recordable Media:

CD-ReWriteable Media:

CD-R

In the left screenshot you see that the Premium drive had no problems reaching 52x recording. The achieved speeds were a little higher than the Lite-On LTR-52246S (39.50x average, 51.95x maximum) but lower than the TEAC CD-W552E (41.24x average, 54.25x maximum). We'll of course check out what the achieved results mean in real terms later on in this review.

CD-RW

The Premium's 24x re-write performance was very close to the Plextor PX-W4824A (23.91x average). With an average re-write speed of 23.90x the Premium drive achieved a higher speed than the Lite-On LTR-52246S (18.12x average) and the TEAC CD-W552E (23.80x average).

Introduction

Q-Check