Review: Plextor Plexwriter 8/4/32.

Holy laser beams, Batman!

A little over two years ago I got a brand-new Hi-Val 2/6 CD recorder (re-marked Mitsumi), and in all seriousness, it was a beautiful thing to behold. The simple fact that I owned a burner when having one was a rare thing (even among the geek crowd) made my day. This was, of course, before most game companies used CD copy protection. In fact, back then, the cheaper the CDR the better, as there wasn’t a large difference between burners. Oh, how joyous the days of carefree pira- err, backuping were!

About a month or two after expressing continual joy about my burner, my father bought a brand-new HP CDR, which was pretty damn slick; not only did it support packet writing, but it wrote to CD RW’s. It was obvious at the time that burner technology was getting better and better, as my Hi-Val did neither, and the press releases for upcoming burners made my Hi-Val look like something from the Stone Age. No biggie of course, but as CDR’s were burning faster, I felt a little deficient. When I chucked my Jaz drive half a year ago, I decided I was ready to move on and get some RW lovin’, and since my burner was getting more and more picky with what kind of media it would burn to, and whether or not it would even read a disk, I opted to upgrade.

Every computer geek knows that Plextor has the skizzles when it comes to making quality CD-Roms, and their burners were among the best out there. When Plextor announced that they would release a budget IDE drive (steering away from their normal SCSI dedication), I jumped when I found a decent price, and ordered the Plextor Plexwriter 8/4/32.

Review

Before I give you the run-down of my experience with the Plexwriter, lemme give you tech-heads some specs straight from Plextor’s site:

• ATAPI-4 / E-IDE interface
• 3-in-1 Drive: 8X CD-R, 4X CD-RW, 32X max CD-ROM
• Fast 170 ms average random access time
• Error-free double bearing auto balancing spindle motor
• Reliable, dust-proof, vibration dampening construction
• Flash ROM allows for easy upgrade over the internet
• Supports Track-at-Once, Disc-at-Once, Session-at-Once, multisession, fixed and variable packet writing
• Full 1-year warranty including unlimited toll-free technical support

In addition, the Plexwriter has 4MB of RAM, which is quite unusual for IDE-based burners; most have only 2MB. The Plexwriter is also capable of using 80-minute CD’s, and can also overburn CD’s with the proper software. Approximate cost: $250.

With that said, Plextor doesn’t screw around, and though I was disappointed at their software bundle, the burner was packed quite nicely, with a safety plate keeping the internal burner-stuffin’ from gettin’ messed up; I haven’t seen that kind of a precaution used with any burner I’ve used.

Installation of the Plexwriter was quick and straightforward, giving me absolutely no trouble at all. I decided that this was an opportune time to get my HotRod 66 controller card working again, which I did, and then attached the Plexwriter to the secondary IDE chain (ATA/33) as a Master drive. This left me with my primary HD as Master on the primary chain, my DVD player as the Slave on the primary, and my second HD (ATA/66) as a Master on the tertiary chain.

My Hi-Val thrown into the Plextor packaging for later relocation, I booted my system without stall; my Award BIOS identified the Plextor drive, and I entered Windows. As I mentioned above, I was disappointed at the software bundle, as the Plexwriter came with a 3.x version of Adaptec CD Creator. I had been using version four with my old Hi-Val burner, so though I didn’t have to go back to the evil 3.x version, I was hoping for a more powerful program along the lines of CDR-Win, or Nero. The rest of the bundle was pretty decent, though: Direct-CD for drag’n drop packet writing, and the Plextor Manager 2000 package, which includes MVP 2000 (burn most audio files to normal audio CD), Disc Dupe 2000 (bit-by-bit copying of CD’s with another Plextor drive), and Audio Capture 2000 (exactly what it sounds like). While Disc Dupe proved too useless for me (as I don’t own another Plextor drive), and though Audio Capture isn’t anything too spiffy, MVP 2000 is a nice program, and I found it to be even nicer when I realized that my copy of MP3 creator didn’t work with the Plexwriter. Fortunately, with MVP 2000, I was still able to burn mp3’s as normal CD audio. Phew!

Upon installation of the software bundle, I attempted to burn a backup CD. Unfortunately, Adaptec CD Creator didn’t detect the Plexwriter as a valid burner, and I was out of luck. I figured it might be because I used to use it with an older Hi-Val burner, so I uninstalled the app and reinstalled it. After booting up, I got a pretty scary error message along the lines of, “A necessary file was overwritten with an older version of itself. Please reinstall Windows from the original CD.” After cursing some, I rebooted and the error didn’t reappear. Instead, I got another one: a BSOD involving scsi2hlp.vxd. Fortunately, I recalled reading something about this file in a thread over on the Ars Technica Forum, and doing a quick search I found a solution: just delete the damn file. Doing so, I rebooted (fine, this time) and started up Adaptec CD Creator, and lo and behold, it detected the Plexwriter. Don’t ya just love Windows?

Selecting the files I wanted to copy via Adaptec CD Creator, I selected an 8x burn speed and hit the start button. No go. The buffer filled itself but nothing burned. I tried it again with a 4x speed, and the CD burnt perfectly fine. Unsatisfied, I decided to download a patch for Adaptec CD Creator 4.x and the latest firmware revision of my drive. After installing both of them (didn’t even have to reboot into DOS Mode for the firmware upgrade!), I tried the procedure again at 8x, and everything worked fine. I burnt ~700 MB of files in about 12 minutes.

After everything seemed to work fine, I decided to see what kind of copy-protection circumvention I could do in case I needed to backup one of my game CDs. I had looked into CDR-Win, Nero, CloneCD, and other programs before, but my crappy Hi-Val was so old, hardly anyone bothered to hook me up with any support for it, if it could even handle it. I had high hopes for my new Plexwriter, however.

Unfortunately, I should have done some more research before buying the Plexwriter, as my model wasn’t supported by any of the apps I mentioned aside from Nero. Unfortunately, Nero doesn’t like to run in conjunction with Direct CD, and since I wanted to use Direct CD with some hot RW lovin’, using Nero was out of the question. Fortunately, CDR-Win will support the Plexwriter 8/4/32 within a month’s time, and I expect other companies to achieve support for this drive as well in the near future. The boys over at Plextor told me that they don’t officially support raw writing of the drive, but then again, they said they don’t officially support it on any of their drives. In fact, other software authors, they claimed, could do an implementation of this sort at their leisure. So, I’m keeping a lookout to see which programs will support my Plexwriter. So long as CDR-Win supports it, though, and maybe PSX-Copy, I think I’ll be all set.

People are always telling me how great SCSI is, and I’m always telling them that it’s really not necessary. The Plexwriter 8/4/32 made my point: I was burning an audio CD while multitasking in the background. I was doing some messaging in ICQ, transferring files over ICQ, browsing the web, and doing some word processing as well. My computer suddenly decided it didn’t like the number of files that were coming through ICQ (which it does, from time to time) and froze up on me. No mouse action, no screen refreshing, nothing. I sighed, thinking that my half-burnt CD would find its way into the trashcan, but ten or so seconds after Ctrl+Alt+Deleting, the task manager came up, and I shut down the offending application. With my old CDR, the burned disk would have been garbage with this kind of system freeze, and undoubtedly many other drives as well. Not the Plextor, though. It kept doing its thing, and gave me a perfectly burnt CD when it was done. And after the freeze, I was able to continue multitasking with the burner still doing its thing.

After using numerous CDR’s, I’ve finally settled on a victor. While I wouldn’t recommend the SCSI Plextors to the average enthusiast because of their price, the 8/4/32 is an excellent burner with a decent price tag. I haven’t burnt one coaster yet, and with the added ability to write to RW disks, I know my documents will be safely backed up without fear of losing them to a hard drive crash. Considering you pay a comparable price for a similar HP burner, with Plextor’s reputation, how can you possibly go wrong with this drive? As I see it, the only thing that might be holding you back is the lack of software compatibility, which doesn’t seem like it’s an issue that will last too much longer.

Verdict: 9/10 Pluses: Excellent, reliable burning at fast speeds. The Plextor name carries with it a great reputation. Minuses: Crappy software bundle and lack of supporting third-party applications. Final Words: The Plexwriter 8/4/32 receives our “Best CDR Award”, and I don’t think it’ll be topped anytime soon.

Tagged as: hardware, mendax.org, pc