WHAT'S HOT: The 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.

WHAT'S NOT: 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.

WHAT ELSE: Plextor offers a one-year warranty and toll-free technical support for 10 hours on weekdays.

UPSHOT: 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.

SUMMARY

Plextor PlexWriter 24/10/40A 24X/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. $145 800/886-3935 www.plextor.com