PleXWriter PX-W4012TS SCSI CD-RW- Page 10

Conclusion

The PleXWriter PX-W4012TS comes to fulfill a specific market where most manufacturers avoid entering so far. Although the SCSI interface used to be the no1 choice for power users, today it has been neglected and set aside by the evolution of IDE devices and the fast USB2.0 and FireWire interfaces. The increased cost of SCSI devices gave the manufacturers no other choice but to drop it and continue evolving the IDE devices. Plextor comes to change that with the PX-W4012TS.

The drive worked in the most of the tests either equally or slightly slower than its IDE brother (PX-W4012A). All the familiar technologies are present (BURN Proof, PoweRecII, Mt. Rainier, VariRec, 4MB buffer) as in the IDE model. The drive can rip Audio CDs in a high speed and at the same time, is able to handle Audio protected discs. Reading and writing of CD-Text is not a problem, while the overburning limit has been increased to fully support 99min discs. The package is poor compared with the IDE model (one piece of CD-R instead of five pieces of the PX-W4012A) and comes with a 2-year warranty for the EU buyers.

Listing the negatives, we must note the high Jitter values at the maximum speed with various media, while the error correction capabilities could be better. In addition, although retrieving of C2 error information is present its accuracy is not high. Users who wish to backup their discs will not be satisfied by the limited EFM hardware correction, but this is a common characteristic for all drives that use SANYO chipsets. As a last note we could say that the price of the drive is not very compatible, since very cheap 52X solutions can be found at a price around Euro100.

Summarizing our thoughts, we can say that we expected a better overall performance from the PX-W4012TS, considering the high price of Euro270. The PX-W4824A is available in almost half this price and performs faster in the most of the tests. Of course the SCSI interface is what some users have been requesting from Plextor to implement, so we can assume that they will give the extra money to buy it :-)