Our friends from CDRLabs.com have wrapped up their latest review. This time they've taken a look at a small and portable PleXCombo drive which we also reviewed a while back. The portable drive, model PX-208TU, can write and re-write CD-R discs at 8X. Reading of CD's is done at 24X while reading of DVD discs is done at 8X.
As a reader, the PX-208U did pretty well in our tests. The drive had no problems reaching 24x with both pressed and CD-R media, but its CD-RW read speeds were limited to only 10x. Unfortunately, the drive's DAE speeds were also limited to a very "un-Plextor-like" 10x. When it came time to read DVD's, Plextor's new combo drive was able to read data DVD's at 8x and DVD movies at 4x and had no problems reading DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW discs. As a writer, the PX-208U definitely won't break any speed records. However, its 8x writing and rewriting speeds were fast enough to allow us to write an entire 650MB CD in about 10 minutes. |
Lastly, you have the PX-208U's features. If you're expecting to see features like BURN-Proof, PoweRec or VariRec, you might be a little disappointed because the PX-208U has very little in common with Plextor's desktop drives. While the drive does have some sort of buffer underrun protection, it's not Sanyo's BURN-Proof. And, with the drive writing at only 8x, PoweRec really isn't necessary because the writing quality is pretty good as it is. Plextor does come through in the software department though. The PX-208U comes with a variety of programs including Easy CD Creator, SimpliCD and PowerDVD.
The "un-Plextor-like" behaviour is caused by this drive not using a Plextor laser unit as we discovered in our review of the same drive (see the update on August 9th). The Plextor PleXCombo gets an overall score of 8. You can read CDRLabs' entire review here.
Source: CDRLabs.com
