Introduction

I remember about 3 years ago when a friend of mine was the first one in my dorm to have a CD burner. It was a slow 2X burner but at the time it was the cutting edge of technology. Everyone would go to him and ask him to burn them CDs. They would usually provide their own CDs or pay him for one of his. He'd usually tell them that the CD will be ready in half an hour. Back then that was considered fast. It's funny how things have changed since then. Burning CDs only takes a few minutes with today's technology. Nowadays all my friends have CD burners and I was the last one to break down and buy one. I figured, well my friends have then so I'll just ask them to make me a CD if I need to. I know what you're thinking, damn free loader, but let's face it, I don't burn CDs often enough to justify getting a burner. I know many of you probably don't either. So what made me decide to get my own? Even though I only burn maybe a CD a month if that at all, every time I would my friends would give me a hard time. I did provide my own CDs but I also felt guilty about bothering them about it. To make matters worse, when I go back home at the end of the semester I don't have their burners at my disposal anymore. Without my own burner I never really backed up my important data. That caught up to me when I lost my data drive a couple months back. So it was time to finally get a burner, and no more begging and doing "special favors" either... :)

Well at the time the fastest burner my friends had was the Yamaha 16x burner. I was very much tempted to buy that except for one little problem, it didn't have BURN proof technology. I know, I know what could go wrong in 5 minutes... Well I've seen things go wrong with his burner and I wanted a little insurance. My goal was to be able to still do everything I normally do and burn a CD at the same time. I decided to get Plextor's 16x burner, the PlexWriter 16/10/40. That's where this review comes in. Although I said I didn't really have a need to create my own CDs, just having the burner makes me want to use it. I've gotten quite a lot of use out of it by backing up my data and programs, and creating music CDs. We've come a long way from the old 2X burners, with 24X drives already hitting the market. The Plextor PlexWriter 16/10/40 is still a top contender, especially with the reduced prices. The release of the new 24X PlexWriter will surely lower prices even more. It's very fast, and perfect for those that want speed but don't want to spend over $200. Plextor has been providing high quality CD drives for some time now and this drive is no exception. Hopefully this review will give you some insight into the PlexWriter from a first timers perspective. So let's see what this baby has to offer.

Specifications And Features

As you can see the drive supports a wide variety of CD formats as well as read/write speeds and methods. Not only is it a 16X writer, it also rewrites at 10X, and acts as a 40X CDROM drive. You'll see a little later in the review whether or not the drive lives up to the specs. The software that comes with the drive is your basic Adaptec Easy CD Creator, Direct CD, and Plextor's own PlextorManager and Liquid Player. Of course, you can install your favorite CD burning software instead. Since I'm just using the burner for regular stuff like data CDs and audio CDs, the Adaptec software is fine by me. The more advanced user will want to use other CDR software out there such as Nero or CDRWIN. As stated earlier, this drive has Burn-Proof technology that eliminates buffer underrun errors, so you don't get that coaster effect on your CDs. The 2MB buffer doesn't seem like much, but it's enough because of the Burn-Proof. For those not in the know, the coaster effect is when you ruin a CD, as a result turning it into a coaster. Burn-Proof was developed by Sanyo and is present in this drive. Other burners out there also use this same Sanyo drive and have the Burn-Proof technology as well. You can rest easy and continue with your daily routine knowing that most anything you do won't damage the CD. I know you music enthusiasts out there are going to want to be able to extract your audio fast, and this drive certainly satisfies those cravings. Although not as fast as other dedicated CDROM drives on the market, it still adds a valuable feature to your system.

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