52x CDRW Roundup - Page 15

Conclusion

Optorite CW5201

Plextor Premium

Summarizing the benchmarking results, we start with the reading performance. Both Optorite and Plextor drives are very fast readers with pressed and CD-R media. The Premium drive offers 52x reading only when the SpeedRead function is enabled. Users should have in mind that ejecting the disc resets the reading speed to the default 40x. In addition, the seek times are low for both drives, while the Plextor is slightly faster in this area.

Ripping of audio discs is supported at the maximum speed for both drives. The Optorite CW5201 gave a high performance in the ripping test with the ABEX-726 (defected, fingerprints) disc but gave back read errors with the TCD-721R (scratched). In the same test, the Plextor Premium was accurate with both discs.

Audio protected discs were easily read by both drives, although the Plextor drive gave a few errors in the produced audio files with the Cactus Data Shield 200 disc. The Optorite CW5201 read the discs fast and accurately. As for the 99min discs, the Plextor drive can read the whole contents while Optorite CW5201 stops at 92min.

In the writing part, the quality of the produced CD-R media is good for the Optorite drive, although the drive gave high 3T Land jitter values with specific discs. The Plextor drive also made quality burnings, and the PlexTools C1/C2 tests did not reveal any uncorrectable errors.

Rewriting at 32x was possible only with the Optorite drive. The media we used came from Mitsubishi Chemicals, and the drive finished the writing test in a very impressive writing time. However, the jitter measurements on the specific disc were not very encouraging, especially due to the increased 3T Land values. A future firmware upgrade will add the 32x rewriting capability to the Premium drive.

Various data protections were easily over passed by the Plextor Premium without any software help (at least at the SafeDisc2 case). On the other hand, the Optorite CW5201 drive even with software help failed to produce accurate backups.

The Plextor Premium kit includes the PlexTools Professional software suite. The upgraded software offers some very interesting functions as we have mentioned in the previous pages. Although we will provide more details in an upcoming article, we cannot ignore the GigaREC function. The drive is capable of writing up to 1.2GB on 99min discs and generally increases the nominal capacity of a CD-R disc by 40% maximum. However, our tests showed that the readability of these discs is not very high. The Q-Check functions are impressive since till now you found them only at expensive testing equipment and many users will enjoy them!

Optorite CW5201 is an attractive recorder offering a high quality / price level. On the other hand, Plextor continues its tradition to offer quality CD writers. The Optorite is available at a MSRP price of $59, while Plextor Premium can be found at $120 approximately.