Plextor PlexWriter Premium

This is a niche review. That is to say that it won’t be attempting to examine every aspect of the PlexWriter Premium, instead it will go into some depth about the issues important to the author. I hope that you find something in this review that you don’t find in the mainstream ones.

Four drives were used to gather experience for this review;

• The PlexWriter Premium itself, referred to as simply the PlexWriter,
• An ASUS external DVD-ROM/CDr/CD-RW/CD-ROM USB2.0/Firewire drive, connected using USB2.0, referred to as the Asus,
• An Imation RipGo! USB1.1 8cm CDr/CD-ROM MP3 player, referred to as the RipGo, and
• The bundled external PCMCIA CD-ROM drive that came with my Sharp Actius 150, referred to as the Sharp.

All but the last drive are connected to a single Windows XP Pro PC. Rough specs are; nForce2 motherboard, AMD 2200+ CPU, 512MB of RAM, ATA and SATA hard drives. The PlexWriter is the only device on its channel.

All the media used to test is Imation media, either 185MB 8cm media or 700MB 12cm media

The main feature being reviewed is the “GigaRec” extra capacity feature. It’s designed to store more information on normal CDr media by physically packing it tighter on the surface of the disc. It has four settings; Off, 1.2x, 1.3x and 1.4x which store the normal amount, 20% extra, 30% extra and 40% extra respectively. The GigaRec feature is not the normal “overburning” technique and can be used in addition to this technique.

First impressions

After a review of this drive was linked to from Slashdot I decided to see if I could get a drive with Sanyo’s HD-Burn technology. That’s right, mention of this drive and a comment in the resulting discussion reminded me of a previously announced technology to double the capacity of a normal CD. I was unable to source one through my preferred supplier, so I asked after the PlexWriter itself and a few working days later had one delivered.

The install was painless. Out with my old malfunctioning Creative Labs Infra, in with the PlexWriter. I purposely secured it with some rubber washers in with the screws to reduce vibrations and either that worked or the drive is well produced (probably the latter) because it’s a wonderfully quiet drive when in use.

The absolute first thing I noticed about the drive was the way the tray moved. As a fan of 8cm media I’ve met tray drives that go in and out so violently that they dislodge any disc that isn’t full-sized. The PlexWriter’s drive moves fast in the middle of the motion but accelerates and decelerates very gracefully so as not to risk popping an 8cm CD out of the groove.

Software

I installed three main bits of bundled software; Nero v5.5.10.18 Plextor, the PlexTools and InCD. Respectively the main burning software, a configuration suite with some basic burning tools and a CD-RW driver that theoretically allows reading and writing to CD-RWs like you would a floppy disk or other removable drive. This last feature has not yet been tested.

I was familiar with Nero as it was the bundled software with my RipGo.

All the software installed first time and with no issues serious enough for me to recall.

GigaRec

After installing everything I set about burning a GigaRec disc. I chose an 8cm disc because that’s all that will fit in the RipGo.

The process works like this:

• Open Nero.
• Turn on the overburning feature in Nero. This basically just lets Nero send more data at a disc than it thinks will fit.
• Open the PlexTools.
• Go to the GigaRec page in the drive properties section. You will get some warnings the first time.
• Turn on GigaRec, choose your setting (1.2x, 1.3x, 1.4x). You will get more warnings the first time.

At this point the GigaRec settings page will tell you how much data you’ll be able to fit on the disc with each setting.

• Go to Nero and setup the files for burning.
• In the Write settings you will now need to choose 4x speed and Disc At Once.
• Start writing, dismiss the warnings from Nero.
• At the end of the process, the GigaRec setting automatically goes off.

The first disc I burnt at only the 1.2x setting. It worked fine, verified fine, no errors reported by Nero. I then whacked it straight into my RipGo which simply refused to believe there was a disc in there. Since there is no setting lower than 1.2x, the RipGo was out of the contest. I then placed it in the Asus, which read it fine. It copied the entire disc back to the hard drive with no problems, although it made some sounds which indicated that it was struggling a little.

With the 8cm drive out of the picture, I next had roughly 980MB to archive to CD. These were a small collection of large files and it was therefore quite handy that they would fit onto a 700MB CD with the 1.4x setting, so that’s what I did. There was a verify error at the end of the process, but a quick test of each of the seven files on the CD using the PlexWriter indicated that there were no problems. I then placed the disc in my Asus and let Windows try to generate thumbnails. The last file failed, but all the others came up fine.

I now had a theory.

I tested my theory by burning another 8cm disc, this time at 1.4x. The PlexTools indicate that the disc can hold 202MB at normal settings, and therefore 282MB of data at 1.4X. I should not have believed it. I tried to fit 270MB of data on the disc, but I got verify errors at the end. The disc is only rated to 185MB and therefore 1.4x is only 259MB. I didn’t bother testing this disc in any other drives.

But the third disc was just right. 250MB is a nice upper limit, 244MB went on smoothly with no verify errors. The Asus drive was also able to read the disc perfectly from beginning to end. A forth disc worked exactly the same as the third.

The theory is that while the laser in the Asus drive is perfectly capable of reading the data to the edge of the disc, the standards are such that the drive simply doesn’t know how to address some of the extra data. This makes GigaRec-ed 12cm discs impossible to fully appreciate in normal drives. Sure, a good drive will probably be able to read the surface, but it will most likely choke on any files beyond a particular point. Fortunately I don’t care nearly as much about full-sized media as I do about 8cm media and no matter what I do with the PlexWriter I’m not fitting more than 850MB on an 8cm disc.

As a final test, since I had to power up my Sharp Actius 150 simply because I don’t have a word processor installed on anything else, I tried two of the 8cm discs in the Sharp drive. A 1.4x failed so badly as to stall the OS until I popped the lid of the drive, but the 1.2x disc worked perfectly and this old drive was able to copy the entire contents of the disc to the hard drive with no errors.

Winding up