Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40AThe PlexWriter 24/10/40A excelled at our tests
of digital audio extraction, taking just 1 minute, 40 seconds to extract 320MB
of audio tracks--still one of the fastest times we've seen. Plextor's software
bundle includes the basic version of Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5.01 and DirectCD
5.01; if you want the larger palette of features that the full version of Easy
CD Creator offers (such as music editing), you'll need to upgrade for about
$80. The PlexWriter 24/10/40A also comes with Plextor Manager 2000, which
includes the company's AudioFS drivers for transferring individual tracks from
an audio CD to your PC via the drag-and-drop interface of Windows
Explorer.The drive managed to log only so-so performance
numbers in our tests. The Plextor lagged 28 seconds behind the average of
competing 24X-class drives when burning our image file, and was 19 seconds
slower than the average at writing to CD-R on the fly (the drive required 4
minutes, 37 seconds and 4 minutes, 39 seconds, respectively, to complete these
tasks). The PlexWriter also took substantially longer to write to
CD-RW--requiring 1 minute, 39 seconds to write our 100MB test folder to CD-RW
media using packet writing, compared with an average of 1 minute, 24 seconds
for other 24X drives that are rated at 10X for writing to CD-RW.Plextor offers a one-year warranty and
toll-free technical support for 10 hours on weekdays.Plextor's drive is a bit sluggish compared with
other drives in the same speed class; however, topflight digital audio
extraction results and drivers for dragging and dropping individual audio
tracks from a CD make this model a viable option if you like to make custom-mix
audio CDs.14524X/10X/40X, IDE, internal, 4MB buffer,
buffer underrun protection, Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.01 and Direct CD 5.01,
one-year warranty, 10-hour weekday toll-free support.www.plextor.com800/886-3935
