Review: Plextor UltraPlex Wide 40 (Page 3/5) Posted: February 4, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Benchmark System AMD “Thunderbird” Athlon 1.1GHz

Asus A7V v. 1.2 with BIOS 1002 motherboard with VIA 4-in-1 4.2
256MB PC133 Micron Cas2 SDRAM
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 46GB UltraATA/100 7200RPM
Adaptec 39160 Dual Channel Ultra160 LVD SCSI host adapter
Intel EtherExpress PRO 100+ Ethernet Adapter
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!

Plextor UltraPlex Wide 40
Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32S

Microsoft Windows 98SE
Golden Hawk Technology CDRWin 3.8c
CDSpeed99 0.8 Beta
SiSoft Sandra CD Test

For this test, I decided to write a CD at 12X from the UltraPlex into the PlexWriter while copying contents to two different destinations. This should keep the drive very busy.

In regards to BURN-Proof, you can actually tell when a buffer-underrun has occurred while looking at the drive even when BURN-Proof is enabled. If you have a PlexWriter 12/10/32S (I’m not sure about the ATAPI one), the High speed Writer LED while turn off and back on again very quickly during write when a buffer-underrun has occurred.

While I was recording -- not during this test -- I noticed that the Write LED turned off during writing for a split second and naturally I was worried but the burn finished successfully without any errors reported by CDRWin. It goes to show, some technologies aren’t merely gimmicks after all. Bnechmarks CDSpeed99


CDSpeed99 Graph

From the rising speed line, we can conclude that Plextor does indeed meet its drive rating unlike many other manufacturers who boast speeds the drives can’t reach or average. The Yellow line denotes RPM speed that the disc is spinning at multiplied by 1000. Next Page