PleXWriter PX-W4012A IDE CDR-W - Page 6

CDR Tests - Page 1

- Procedure

We tested the drive with latest version of Nero/CloneCD. We used various media for our tests: Mitsubishi Chemicals 74/80min 24x/32x certified, Mitsui 74min 24x certified, Taiyo Yuden 74/80min 24/32x certified, Ricoh 80min 24x certified, Hitachi-Maxell 80min 32x/40x certified and Ricoh 4-10X HS-RW media.

Plextor currently supports 40x-writing speed with the following media:

• Mitsubishi Chemical CR74/80 VA1
• Hitachi Maxell CDR 74/80 MIX.1P (Must indicate 32X)

That means you can forget low priced media written up to 40x. For the 32x writing speed, more media are supported:

• Taiyo Yuden CDR-74/80 TYN/TYSBN (Must indicate 32X)
• Ricoh CDR74/80-32X CW10
• Mitsubishi Chemical CR74AA1N
• Mitsui Chemical CDRQ74MG

For a complete supported media list visit Plextor Europe website. We burned CDs at almost all recording speeds from 16x up to 40x using the SAME amount of data for all the drives. The drive will not warn you if a medium cannot be burned at 40x or 32x recording speed. Other manufacturers automatically drop recording speed when media cannot handle maximum recording speed. The good in that case is that user can understand which media can be used for each recording speed. With PX-W4012A you just select the 40x recording speed, and the drive chooses automatically, through PoweRec II system, the appropriate burning speed.

The posted recording times are the best we had from our test results. Using other media can increase the final burning time.

- Comparison

Before starting the recording tests, let's see how the drives are compared in the writing/rotation speeds:

As we can see the Plextor PX-W4012A starts writing at 20x CLV, same as Philips PCRW3210, shifts up to 24x at 10mins, up to 32x at 30mins and up to 40x at 58mins. That gives Plextor PX-W4012A a theoretical average writing speed up to 29.91X when using an 80min CD. The Philips PCRW3210 has an average writing speed of 26.85X and CyberDrive CW058D 26.85X As we can see the incensement of the average writing speed, compared to the 32x recorders is not such high as we might expected. The main reason are the drops of writing speed, during the various speed shifts:

Plextor PX-W4012A starts writing at very high rotation speed (9800rpm), which is gradually reduced towards 6mins. The drive keeps its rotation speed high in order to be able to write at such high recording speeds. The Philips PCRW3210 drive keeps its rotation speed below 9000rpm. This must be the noisest Plextor recorder ever tested.

- 74min CD-R Tests

We created a "DataCD" job with data slightly more than 74mins (74:03:65). We burned the same job with all five tested drives:

The faster drive at the 16x writing speed comes from AOpen. The drive ends the task at 310 (JustSpeed disabled). The Philips PCRW3210 comes second with 311, CyberDrive third with 312secs, Mitsumi CR-480ATE forth with 314 and LiteOn LTR-32123S follows with 315secs. Plextor PX-W4012A comes last with 319 seconds

Mitsumi CR-480ATE doesn't support 20x writing speed option

The faster recorder at the 20x writing speed comes from CyberDrive with 257secs. Plextor PX-W4012A comes second with 259secs, very close to the LiteOn drive (260 sec).

At the 24x writing speed, we have a few surprises. The faster recorder comes from CyberDrive with the incredible time of 224secs. Plextor PX-W4012A comes second with 227 seconds, LiteOn LTR-32123S third with 236 seconds. Even the Plextor PX-W4012A supposed to be faster, due to its 20x CLV starting writing speed, the final recording time is higher than CyberDrive's CW058D.

Philips PCRW3210 doesn't support 20x writing speed option

At 32X writing speed, Plextor PX-W4012A was the fastest drive with 201 secs, followed by CyberDrive CW058D with 203 seconds. Here the 20x CLV writing speed of Plextor drive does make a difference.

At last we hit the maximum recording speed of 40x. At this time Plextor PX-W4012A has no competition. The task was finished after 3:18 seconds. As you can see the writing time is very close to the one the drive has given when writing at 32X. (3:21 secs). This probably happens, because the drive shifts up to the maximum writing speed 40x just at the 58 minutes spot (74 min entire CD), and so the max writing speed is applied for a limited time frame. The same results are expected to be better with higher capacity media, i.e. with 80 min CDs. The best time came with Mitsubishi's Chemical media.