Plextor's detailed, well-written manual makes it easy to install and use the drive; the inclusion of a detailed fold-out installation poster is especially helpful. The drive ships with Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5.1, as well as Plextor Manager 2000 and labeling software from Stomp. According to Plextor, this drive offers support for the Mount Rainier specification. The Mount Rainier site says this standard is supposed to enable "native [operating system] support of data storage on CD-RW," thus eliminating the need to install hardware drivers and CD-burning programs, like those from Roxio and Nero, in order to be able to drag and drop files. However, there's no support for Mount Rainier in Windows XP (or other operating systems), though Microsoft does plan to add it to the next full upgrade of Windows.
The drive is also the only one on the chart to limit the speed at which you can write audio CDs: The maximum speed in this mode is 24X. Plextor says this limitation was made to maintain the quality of audio recordings.