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In this part of our PlexWriter Premium review we'll test how fast the drive can read various media, including audio CDs. As we already mentioned during this review, the Premium drive is by default limited to 40x reading. For the following read tests SpeedRead has been enabled via the PlexTools software.

The PlexTools screenshot above tells us that the Premium drive can read all types of media at 52x when SpeedRead is enabled. Let's see if this is indeed the case.

Pressed Discs:

For the transfer rate tests we used a pressed CD-ROM containing PlexTools v1.05 which was exactly 74 minutes (333.000 sectors) long. Below you can see the produced Nero CD/DVD Speed graphs:

From the graph you can see that the Premium drive didn't reach 52x reading. In the table below, where we compare the drive to other recorders we've reviewed, you can see that the Premium's performance was however not that bad since it performed a little better than the TEAC CD-W552E. The Premium's seek times were very good but a little below specified (<65ms random stroke):

CD-Recordable Discs:

For the transfer rate tests with CD-Recordable Media we used a back-up (CD-R) of a PlexTools v1.05 disc. The used disc was a 'That's Write' CD-R certified up to 16x writing and manufactured by Gigastorage.

The graph shows us that the Premium drive performs a little better than we saw with the pressed disc. When we compare the drive to the other recorder we've reviewed we can see that the Premium drive is the slowest one. But, on the other hand, its seek times are (far) better and this time very close to the drive's specification:

CD-ReWriteable Discs:

To test the transfer rate with CD-RW discs we again used the "PlexTools v1.05" disc only this time we read from a CD-ReWriteable disc. The used disc was a 'Plextor High Speed CD-RW' disc. Below you can see the produced graphs with Nero CD/DVD Speed again:

The Premium drive produced an excellent result when reading the CD-RW media. Not only did it perform better than with the pressed and CD-R media, it's also one of the very few drives that can read CD-RW at maximum speed. The Plextor blew away both the Lite-On and the TEAC as you can see in the table below:

Audio Discs - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the Premium DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) performance we used Nero CD/DVD Speed to do a transfer rate test. The audio disc we used was of a slightly larger size than in our previous tests (77 minutes):

As you can see from the produced graph something went wrong here since the Premium drive slowed down to 33x maximum. When we tried another audio disc (of also 77 minutes) we achieved a better result:

This time the Premium drive had no problems reaching 52x and it was even faster than both the Lite-On and TEAC drives, as you can see in the table below:

As a final test we used PlexTools to extract the audio disc to our hard disk. As an extra tests we also tested the drive's performance using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) in Secure Mode. The Premium drive caches audio, has an accurate stream and can report C2 error information.

PlexTools Professional

Exact Audio Copy - Secure Mode

The Premium drive had no problems reaching 52x read speeds when ripping the audio disc using the PlexTools software. The drive also showed good performance when using it with EAC and its Secure Mode. We had to disable SpeedRead though since else the drive had a tendency to slow down for no apparent reason with EAC.

Audio Discs - Advanced DAE Quality Test:

To conclude our read tests we did an 'Advanced DAE Quality Test' with Nero CD/DVD Speed. You can see the produced results below:

The Premium drive showed an excellent result reaching a high average read speed of 36.67x (compared to for instance the TEAC CD-W552E (33.38x) and Lite-On LTR-52246S (33.42x)). The Plextor drive had no problems reading the CD-Text and SubChannel Data from the disc and could read data from both the lead-in and lead-out area of the disc.

Q-Check

Write Tests