Plextor PlexWriter 8/20 CD recorder

Emedia Professional, March, 1999 by Hugh Bennett

for the better part of the past decade, Plextor Corporation of Santa Clara, California has developed a well-earned reputation for making some of the finest CD-ROM drives anywhere with equipment coveted by audio engineers, network administrators, the CD duplication community, and dedicated gamers. Unfortunately, Plextor's CD recording products have never enjoyed such a warm or profitable reception. Success has never translated into its CD recording products. Its first few forays into the CD-R market have yielded capable, but ordinary drives--that is, until now.

Destined to be the production recorder of choice for the fore-seeable future, Plextor's new PlexWriter 8/20 is nothing but state-of-the-art, offering impressive 8X writing speed, 20X max/9X min Partial Constant Angular Velocity (P-CAV) playback, and Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) performance in a solid tray-loading design. Features include a massive 4MB buffer, MultiRead capability, low bandwidth Running Optimum Power Control (Running OPC), Disc-At-Once (DAO) writing and R-W subcode support for CD+G disc reading and creation. As with its major competitor, Sanyo's CRD-R800S (used in Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket), eight-speed recording allows the PlexWriter to write a complete 650MB disc in an incredible 9 minutes.

Compared to Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket, however, the PlexWriter 8/20's bundle, though adequate, is a little stingy. In addition to the recorder, the $599 internal and $689 external models include an Adaptec AHA-2930C PCI SCSI card, cabling, one blank CD-R disc, Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and Direct CD, as well as Plextor's CD Res-Q and Plextor Manager software. However, what the PlexWriter may lack in software comparisons it certainly makes up for in hardware performance.

two pair for software

The PlexWriter's included Adaptec Direct CD 2.5 packet writing software works just the same as using a floppy disk. Direct CD allows writing to a CD-R disc by dragging and dropping files, over the recorder's icon on the computer or saving to the recorder's drive letter from within any application. Like all packet-writing software, Direct CD writes small chunks of data to the disc for as many times as is needed to complete the writing of the user's files and data may be added incrementally at any time until the disc becomes full.

Direct CD is thus very easy to install and use and packet-writing performance with the PlexWriter is predictably good, but it does have its limitations. When manipulating large files, writing speed approaches 8X, but performance decreases significantly when moving around a lot of small files. This bottleneck results from operating system and software overhead which affects all high-speed recorders, so in this regard it would be unfair to single out the PlexWriter for this common concern.

Traditional premastering and audio disc recording chores are handled by an 0EM version of Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 3.5 Standard Edition recording software for Windows 95/98 and NT 4.0. Easily the most popular consumer recording package in North America, Easy CD Creator authors most disc formats including IS0 9660 with Joliet extensions, bootable CD, multisession, CD-DA, CD Extra and mixed-mode. As well, it can duplicate most disc types using its separate CD copying program. However, users wanting to create photo or video CDs or convert analog audio sources to CD must purchase the $99 upgrade to the Deluxe Edition of the program.

Included as well with the PlexWriter is Plextor Manager software, a set of tools used for controlling and taking advantage of the features of Plextor CD-ROM drives and CD recorders. The software allows users to obtain useful information about the hardware and any inserted disc, set the drive read speed and spindown time, play audio and video files and use Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) to capture audio tracks to WAVE files. Disc-to-disc duplication is also made possible by Disc Dupe, a quick and dirty tool for copying existing CDs.

Another impressive function of Plextor Manager is AudioFS, a unique time saving utility that allows users with Plextor CD-ROM drives to view and use the contents of their audio CDs as standard WAVE files. Each track on an audio CD appears as a sound file to allow it to be dragged and dropped to any location or application and the program will invisibly perform the necessary DAE procedure to convert it into a WAVE file.

One piece of software that does set the PlexWriter bundle apart from most recording packages is Plextor's CD Res-Q disaster recovery utility, a unique program that writes an image of an entire hard drive (including operating system) onto CD-R media. CD Res-Q is a dream for extreme gamers constantly reverting to clean installations, technical users for bulletproof backup and system administrators for creating standard installations needed by identical systems in an organization. Hard drives of up to 8GB are supported by spanning multiple CD-R discs as are FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file systems under MS-DOS, plus Windows 3.x, 95 and NT. A backup CD can restore a system from any CD-ROM drive and, if bootable CD-ROM support is available, a PC can be started directly from a backup disc. CD Res-Q uses an MS-DOS interface and requires a basic knowledge of the command line and system drivers so, although it is extremely useful, it is not for the uninitiated.