Plextor 12/4/32 CD burner

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Rating: Excellent!

Review:

I recently decided that my old Plextor 412 had been so good to me that I would buy a newer, faster Plextor drive. I have owned other burners, but none seem to compare to a Plextor, so I purchased a new PX-W124TS. This drive is a SCSI drive. It is also available in IDE, but I have an all SCSI system, so the choice was obvious.

Installation was a piece of cake. I already had a working Adaptec UW SCSI controller, so all I had to do was set the burner to a unique ID and plug it in.

The drive came with Adaptec EZCD3.5, Direct CD, Plextor Manager 2000, and CDRES-Q on a disc. But I already had my own software installed, so I didn't use the disc. I use mainly Nero for burning. The latest version, recognized the 124TS immediately and let me burn at 12x. WinOnCD 3.7PE didn't recognize the newer Plextor, but there where new drivers on the CeQuadrat web site which cured that problem. EZCD4.02 recognized the drive, but wouldn't let me set the record speed over 4x until I ran the system tests on the drive, then it was fine. I wasn't sure how the current media would tolerate burning at 12x, but the Verbatim DataLifePlus CD's handle it just fine, even though they say 8x on the box.

I have burned 42 audio CDs in the last few days and everything worked perfectly. The CDs play fine in my car CD player, my home stereo and the computer.

CDRES-Q is Plextor's version of Symantec's Ghost hard drive back up software. The difference in the two versions is CDRES-Q will write directly to CD-R or CD-RW, but Ghost will not. I have used CDRES-Q since it first came out and I LOVE it. I will create a bootable rescue disc. As long as your BIOS supports booting from a CD-ROM, this works great. I can boot from the disc and restore my entire C: drive in about 20 minutes. Plextor Manager 2000 is nice software also. It can be used to do DAE (digital audio extraction), copying, and setting things like the speed of the drive, spindown time, locking the drive etc.

I know it's a cliche, but this drive definitely rocks!! It is fast, quiet, and works perfectly. Since it is made by Plextor, it will also be very dependable.

Since it reads at 32x, it could be used as a replacement for a CD-ROM, although I prefer to save the CD-R for just burning. It is not as fast at doing DAE as my 40x Plextor, but it does absolutely perfect DAE at 8x.

Submitted by: John M.