Well, a post where I can actually talk about something that I really know...
:D:D
So this is the issue... My first burner was a HP 8100+... I will only say that after that experience, no more HP products for me...
I bought my Plextor drive last December, kind of Christmas gift to myself... Imagine the boost on time and speed when you improve a drive that supposedly burns at 4x (she is only recording at 2x) to a 48x drive.
I can tell you when it comes to spend money, specially on the computer world, I’m that kind of people that must know all the details about the products and that has plenty alternatives. Sometimes instead of clearing the subject i just get more confused and take a little more time to decide.
When i decided to buy the drive I already knew that it had to be a Plextor. When it comes to quality I must say that Plextor is the top (Yamaha are pretty good but they stopped the burner production). So far I have never had a failure and I burn audio/data/mixed CD quite often. It takes around 3-3.3 minutes to burn a 700mb CD (including lead in and out). I’m not talking about the time to read the source cd, just the burn. It has 4mb of buffer witch is more than enough. The burn proof technology has saved some CD to me, but my PC wasn’t working that good by then…
The over burning capacity is amazing, once I was able to put 730 MB on a 700 cd and it worked perfectly on other readers…
I don’t use Plextools although I have it installed but I’d rather go with Nero. Nevertheless I’ve played around with plextools and it’s a very powerful tool.
A curious thing… The last plextor burners have the powerec function that allows you to force a burning speed on a CD when deactivated. I must tell you that I’ve never deactivated mine and I’ve been able to record CD’s at 48x that are not labeled 48x. Some of them where labeled 32x…
To me the negative, if you can call it that, thing on this, and it’s not Plextor fault, is the lack of 24x rw media (tried the 24x Memorex... forget them, they're no good)… I haven’t used any rw media that is faster than 4x so I can’t say much about it. What I can say is that when it comes to rw media the plextor drive doesn’t recognize some very old media that I have (BTC). I mean, it doesn’t erase the media but it records on it… Amazing…
Well has you can see my experience with this drive is very positive and if you don’t have money issues on it then don’t think twice. Go for it.. It’s worth it…But, and in these things there’s always a but, Plextor itself has other faster burners… They have the 52x24x52x and the 52x32x52x (premium) on the market. They are newer so they are more expensive… But they burn faster and have other technologies…
Think about it…
One last thing… It’s important to keep the firmware updated because you get several improvements.
Any other question just ask that I’ll help in whatever I can…
Godd Luck!
AMD and Plextor Rule!!!!!!!!
:D