Plextor PX-B940SA 12x Blu-ray Disc Writer

As a leader in the industry, we've come to expect a lot from Plextor. Over the years, the company has introduced some of the fastest and most feature packed optical drives available. With the PX-B940SA, Plextor has tried to continue this trend. While lacking support for many of their more advanced technologies, Plextor's new 12x Blu-ray Disc writer offers a number of useful features as well as some of the fastest BD reading and writing speeds available.

The PX-B940SA is the first drive from Plextor with the ability to write to both BD-R and BD-R DL media at 12x. At this speed, the drive took a little more than 11 minutes to burn an entire 25GB BD-R disc. The PX-B940SA also turned in some respectable times with BD-RE media. However, without compatible media, I wasn't able to test its full potential when writing to BD-R DL discs. Nevertheless, the PX-B940SA still performed very well in our tests, burning a full 50GB BD-R DL disc in about 25 minutes.

Using the bundled software, the PX-B940SA played all of the Blu-ray movies I had on hand, including those protected by BD+ and with BD-Live enabled features. The drive also performed fairly well in our transfer rate tests, reading single layer BD-ROM's as well as BD-R, BD-RE and BD-R DL media at speeds near 8x. 

Plextor's new drive also has the ability to read and write to all standard DVD formats, including DVD-RAM. The PX-B940SA performed very well when writing to DVD±R discs, taking about 6 minutes to burn an entire 4.7GB DVD. The drive also had no problems holding its own when writing to other types of media. However, the writing quality could have been better with some DVD+R DL discs. When it came to reading DVD's, the PX-B940SA was able to read single layer DVD-ROM's and DVD±R discs at speeds near 16x and other types of recordable media at 12x.

Reading and writing CD's wasn't a problem for the PX-B940SA either. In our tests, it read pressed and CD-R media at speeds as high as 42x and CD-RW discs at 24x. This level of performance carried over to our DAE tests, where the drive ripped audio CD's at speeds as high as 41x. As a writer, the PX-B940SA performed as expected. The drive turned in some respectable times with CD-R media and its writing quality was fairly good. Unfortunately, due to its Z-CLV writing method, it wasn't as fast as some of the other drives in our rewriting tests.

Plextor's new Blu-ray Disc writer also has its share of features. To prevent buffer underruns, the PX-B940SA is equipped with a 4MB buffer that is backed up by some sort of buffer underrun technology. The drive also has a good number of writing and rewriting speeds to choose from as well as the ability to set the book type of DVD+R DL media. To top it off, Plextor has included a great software bundle from CyberLink.

The PX-B940SA is available now and can be purchased through retailers like Amazon for less than $230.

Highs:

• Writes to BD-R and BD-R DL media at 12x
• Writes to BD-RE and BD-RE DL media at 2x
• Writes to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 16x
• Writes to DVD+RW media at 8x
• Writes to DVD-RW media at 6x
• Writes to DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL media at 8x
• Reads single layer BD-ROM's at 8x
• Reads BD-R, BD-RE and BD-R DL media at 8x
• Reads BD-RE DL media at 6x
• Reads single layer DVD-ROM's at 16x
• Reads DVD±R media at 16x
• Reads DVD±R DL and DVD±RW media at 12x
• Features 40x CD-R and 24x CD-RW writing speeds
• Includes buffer underrun prevention technology
• 4MB buffer
• Includes software from CyberLink
• Supports bitsetting for DVD+R DL media
• Reasonably priced (for a Plextor)

Lows:

• Questionable writing quality with some DVD+R DL media
• Had a hard time reaching its rated BD and DVD read speeds
• Reads CD-RW media at only 24x
• Cannot set the book type of DVD+R and DVD+RW media
• Overburns to only 94:27
• Not supported by PlexUtilities software