Our friends from
CDRLabs.com have posted a review of the PlexWriter PX-W5224TA drive, the
somewhat smaller brother of the Plextor Premium drive. As the
model number already indicates, the PlexWriter PX-W5224TA supports 52x
recording and 24x re-writing speeds. Here's part of CDRLabs.com's
conclusion:
 While the PlexWriter Premium raised the bar for the industry, its
price tag put it out of reach of many consumers. For these people, the
PX-W5224TA just might be the answer. This new drive offers the features
and quality people have come to expect from Plextor, at an affordable
price.
Unfortunately, the PX-W5224TA did not
deliver the type of performance we've come to expect from Plextor. Like
the Premium, it had a hard time reaching its rated speeds in our CD read
tests and had a tendency to slow down in a few cases. On the other hand,
the PX-W5224TA had some great seek times and one of the fastest CD-RW read
speeds we've seen. The PX-W5224TA also did pretty well in our DAE tests.
With SpeedRead enabled, it was able to rip audio CD's at speeds as high as
52x, but didn't read scratched discs as well as some of the other
drives.
The PX-W5224TA also turned in some pretty
good times in our writing tests. Just keep in mind that like Plextor's
other drives, its media requirements are a little higher than average. The
PX-W5224TA did seem to be a little more flexible than the Premium, but
there were still a number of discs it would not write to at 52x.
Nevertheless, the drive's writing quality was excellent and with the
ability to disable PoweRec, you can write to your media at whatever speed
you want. The PX-W5224TA didn't perform quite as well when it came to
rewriting. While it was relatively quick with Nero, it took longer than
expected to complete our packet writing tests. Hopefully, this is
something that Plextor can improve upon in a future firmware update.
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The price of the PlexWriter is around $ 89 and as the reviewer
puts it, "it's a way for people to get a taste of Plextor quality, without
taking out a second mortgage on the house." If you're interested in reading
the complete review, then check it out here. If you have any questions related to Plextor and their
products then you're of course welcome to drop by in our Plextor Forum.
Source: CDRLabs.com
