WHAT'S HOT: Unlike some vendors, Plextor skipped over 32X-speed mechanisms and went straight to offering a 40X drive. The PlexWriter 40/12/40A represents a sizable speed jump over the company's previous 24X offering. The 40X drive wrote our 650MB folder of files in 3 minutes, 26 seconds--a minute and 13 seconds faster than the old drive, though 11 seconds off from the leader, TDK's VeloCD 40/12/48.

WHAT'S NOT: Write performance using packet writing to CD-RW media is relatively sluggish: The drive required 1 minute, 19 seconds to write our 100MB folder of files; four other 12X-rated drives took 13 seconds less. The Plextor's digital audio extraction speed was mediocre: It took 1 minute, 44 seconds to rip our 320MB of audio tracks, compared with the Sony CRX195A1's time of 1 minute, 24 seconds.

WHAT ELSE: 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.

UPSHOT: This is a suitably fast choice for writing CD-Rs, but there are better drives if you want to write to CD-RW discs.

SUMMARY

Plextor PlexWriter 40/12/40A 40X/12X/40X, IDE, internal, 4MB buffer, buffer underrun protection, Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.1 and DirectCD 5.1, one-year warranty, 10-hour weekday toll-free support. $150 800/886-3935 www.plextor.com