Plextor Premium-U (52/32/52) review @ CDRLabs.com

The Premium-U is one of the better external writers we've tested. Based on one of the most popular internal writers available, the Premium-U is great looking, easy to install and overflowing with features. The Premium-U also performed pretty well overall. However, there were times when it did not deliver the level of performance we've come to expect from Plextor.

The Premium-U also did pretty well in our CD writing tests. While not the fastest drive we've tested, it was relatively quick and its writing quality was excellent for the most part. Thanks to a firmware update or two, Premium-U's media compatibility was also surprisingly good. While still not as flexible as Lite-On's 52x writer, it was able to write to most of our test media at 52x. Even then, with the ability to disable PoweRec, you can write to your media at whatever speed you want. Unfortunately, the Premium-U didn't do quite as well in some of our rewriting tests. The drive's times were very good when rewriting with programs like Nero, but took longer than expected to complete our packet writing tests.

When it comes to features, Plextor's new external writer is hard to beat. Like the internal version of the drive, the Premium-U includes many of the features we've come to expect from Plextor including BURN-Proof, PoweRec and VariRec. The drive has a number of more advanced features like Plextor's new GigaRec, SecuRec and Q-Check technologies. The Premium-U also comes with a pretty decent software bundle including Roxio's popular Easy CD & DVD Creator suite as well as PlexTools Professional.