detail information

The Plextor Premium drive supports 32x re-writing but unfortunately there is no media available that supports this re-write speed. So, for the following tests we used the Premium drive at 24x re-writing. On this page we'll also check how the drive performs with packet writing (using Ahead's InCD software) and the drive's Mount Rainier performance.

Re-Writing Data:

For our data re-writing tests we simply set up a new compilation of 650MB using the Nero Burning Rom software. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) writing method. In the screenshot below you can see the burn process completed successfully:

Our data compilation was written in 3 minutes and 26 seconds. This was about 13 seconds faster than the TEAC CD-W552E (3m:39s) and a lot faster than the Lite-On (4m:51s, due to its CAV writing method).

Packet Writing:

For our packet writing tests we used the InCD software from Ahead. The InCD option to format the disc to CD-MRW (Mt. Rainier) was disabled since we'll do these tests later on this page of our review. When formatting was complete we measured the time it took for the drive to write our test folder of data. In the table below we've summed up our results:

From the results you can see that the drives were all very close to each other. It really is a shame that we cannot test the Premium's performance with 32x CD-RW media...

Mount Rainier:

To test the Plextor Premium's Mount Rainier performance we again used InCD to write the same folder of test data. In the table below you can see an overview of the achieved results:

The Premium drive showed a pretty good result. Sometimes it was faster than the other drives we've reviewed and sometimes it was a little slower. Perhaps we can soon update this table when we can get our hands on some 32x CD-RW media.

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