PleXCombo PX-320A IDE DVD/CDR-W - Page 5

CDR Tests - Page 1

- Procedure

We tested the drive with latest version of Nero/CloneCD. We used various media for our tests: Mitsubishi Chemicals 74/80min 32x certified, Mitsui 74min 24x and 80min 40xcertified, Taiyo Yuden 74/80min 24/32x/40x certified and Ricoh 4-10X HS-RW media. Plextor recomments the following media for 20x recording speed:

As we can see the list is rather limited for 20x, and the most of the supported media come from Japanese manufacturers, leaving out media from Taiwanese manufacturers. As the test results showed, the drive doesn't have very good compatibility even with 32x or 40x certified media... For sure a firmware update could improve this situation.

You cannot disable the "PoweRec II" option and enable 20x (Z-CLV) with all inserted media. The drive will not warn you if a medium cannot be burned at 16x or 20x recording speed. Other manufacturers automatically drop recording speed when media cannot handle maximum recording speed. The good in that case is that user can understand which media can be used for each recording speed. With PX-320A you just select the 20x recording speed, and the drive chooses, automatically through PoweRec II system, the appropriate burning speed:

We burned CDs at the 16x and 20x recording speeds using the SAME amount of data for all the drives. The posted recording times are the best we had from our test results. Using other media can increase the final burning time.

- Comparison

Before starting the recording tests, let's see how the RICOH and PLEXTOR drives are compared in the writing/rotation speeds:

As we can see the PleXCombo uses Zone-CLV to reach the 20x recording speed. The drive starts writing at 16x and shifts up to 20x at 6mins and stays there till the end of the disc. That gives a theoretical average writing speed up to 19.63X when using an 80min CD. The RICOH MP9200A is faster, since it shifts up to 20x at 4mins. Ricoh's average theoretical writing speed is 19.70X:

The PleXCombo PX-320A is quiet when writing at 20x. The RICOH drive reaches almost 9000rpm and is noisier.

- 74min CD-R Tests

We created a "DataCD" job with data slightly more than 74mins (74:03:64). The PleXCombo PX-320A performed well and needs 315sec to end the task. That's lower even from the PX-W4012A. The Ricoh MP9200A is slightly faster with 313secs.

At the 20x (Z-CLV) recording speed, the PX-320A performed much slower than the PX-W4012A and MP9200A. The best results we had with various media were 274secs, while the RICOH MP9200A is faster by 12secs and PleXWriter PX-W4012A by 15secs. Of course PleXWriter PX-W4012A supports 20x CLV recording speed, but again the time difference from MP9200A is high enough.

Below we can see the screenshot from Nero software at the 20x recording speed, with Mitsui's 74min 16x certified media

The usage of other media for 20x recording can produce a higher recording time even we had originally selected 16x!