Plextor Rewrites the Rules

CD-Rewritable drives have been getting faster and faster--at writing CD-Recordables. But hidden behind that steady stream of CD-R speedups (all the way to 12X), the CD-RW speed limit has remained stuck at a pedestrian 4X. So it's no wonder that, after a burst of recent announcements from Ricoh, Yamaha, and other vendors, CD-RW fans have been eagerly anticipating next-generation drives that also offer CD-RW capabilities of 8X to 10X. Well, the waiting is over: Plextor has set a new pinnacle for CD-RW performance with the release on Monday of its $329 PlexWriter 12/10/32A. Not only does the PlexWriter 12/10/32A deliver state-of-the-art 12X CD-R write speed via the IDE interface, it also offers breathtaking 10X rewrites--something not yet available even to users of SCSI drives.

The PlexWriter 12/10/32A's all-around performance is nothing short of remarkable. The drive turned in a 21.6X CD Tach rating, the fastest we've recorded in the history of PCWorld.com's Top 5 CD-RW Drives. The drive also wrote our 430MB test image to CD-R in 5 minutes, 14 seconds, and copied 100MB worth of files to CD-RW in a mere 1 minute, 32 seconds. That's the kind of performance you want for snappy backups, around the office or at home.

Even more important to the digital audio aficionado, the PlexWriter 12/10/32A extracted our 250MB audio file in a mere 1 minute, 52 seconds--a new Top 5 record. There's only one caveat: To achieve the higher write speeds, you'll need CD-R media that's rated for 12X (available for less than $2 a disc in quantity) and CD-RW media rated at 10X. Though not widely available yet, 10X-optimized CD-RW media is expected to be priced for less than $5 per disc. Plextor ships the drive with one blank 10X CD-RW disc, as well as one blank 12X CD-R disc.