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for the better part of the past decade, Plextor Corporation of Santa Clara, California has developed a well-earned reputation for making some of the finest CD-ROM drives anywhere with equipment coveted by audio engineers, network administrators, the CD duplication community, and dedicated gamers. Unfortunately, Plextor's CD recording products have never enjoyed such a warm or profitable reception. Success has never translated into its CD recording products. Its first few forays into the CD-R market have yielded capable, but ordinary drives-that is, until now.
Destined to be the production recorder of choice for the foreseeable future, Plextor's new PlexWriter 8/20 is nothing but state-of-the-art, offering impressive SX writing speed, 20X max/9X min Partial Constant Angular Velocity [P-CAV) playback, and Digital Audio Extraction [DAE) performance in a solid tray-loading design. Features include a massive 4MB buffer, MultiRead capability, low bandwidth Running Optimum Power Control (Running OPC), Disc-At-Once (DAO) writing and R-W subcode support for CD+G disc reading and creation. As with its major competitor, Sanyo's CRD-R80OS [used in Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket), eight-speed recording allows the PlexWriter to write a complete 650MB disc in an incredible 9 minutes.
Compared to Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket, however, the PlexWriter 8/20's bundle, though adequate, is a little stingy. In addition to the recorder, the $599 internal and $689 external models include an Adaptec AHA-2930C PCI SCSI card, cabling, one blank CDR disc, Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and Direct CD, as well as Plextor's CD Res Gl and Plextor Manager software. However, what the PlexWriter may lack in software comparisons it certainly makes up for in hardware performance.
two pair for software
The PlexWriter's included Adaptec Direct CD 2.5 packet writing software works just the same as using a floppy disk. Direct CD allows writing to a CD-R disc by dragging and dropping files, over the recorder's icon on the computer or saving to the recorder's drive letter from within any application. Like all packet-writing software, Direct CD writes small chunks of data to the disc for as many times as is needed to complete the writing of the user's files and data may be added incrementally at any time until the disc becomes full.
Direct CD is thus very easy to install and use and packet-- writing performance...