- Writing Performance

The Plextor PX 740A supports up to 16x burning speed with both +R and -R DVD media formats. Nero Burning Rom's reported speeds are shown below.

Below, you can see the writing speed graph, as reported by Nero CD-DVD Speed. Notice that the drive uses WOPC, much like BenQ drives, since from this release onwards drives from both manufacturers share the same chipset from Philips. Unlike BenQ drives, the WOPC setting cannot be disabled on the Plextor drive however.

• DVD+R media @ 16X CAV

• DVD-R media @ 16X CAV

The PX 740A supports 8x DVD+RW writing speed, and 6x DVD-RW writing speed. Below, you can see the writing speed graph as reported by Nero CD-DVD Speed.

• DVD+RW media @ 8X Z-CLV

The average reported speed was 7.57x. The speed starts off at 6X and very soon steps up to 8X where it stays until the end. Notice here that the WOPC setting is brought into play again, due to the +RW media format.

• DVD-RW media @ 6X CLV

Average burning speed was 5.89x. The drive started immediately at 6X speed and stayed there until the end.

- Burning Tests

• DVD-R media

Optodisc 16X media was burned at 8X burning speed, while Datawrite, TDK and TY, all 8X media, were burned at 12X (overspeed) in this case. Best case was with TDK media, if we are considering fast burning and not quality.

• DVD+R media

With DVD+R media, the drive did not overspeed at all and all media were burned at their specified speeds according to Nero, although we can see that with BeALL, Optodisc and Philips media, the "true" speed was 4X. Fastest burn came again with TDK media at 16X.

- Comparison with other drives

The reviewed drive was fastest with DVD+R media, while when using +RW and -RW media, all drives reported more or less the same speeds, with the exception of the NEC drive which was fastest with +RW and slowest with -RW media.

- DVD Overburning Tests

Unfortunately, the overburning feature is not supported.