PleXWriter PX-W2410A IDE CDR-W- Page 4

DAE Tests

Test Method:
We used CD DAE 99 v0.21 beta and EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 software in order to check the DAE performance of the PleXWriter PX-W2410A with various AudioCDs (both pressed and CDR). The posted DAE results are the average of both applications, but the CPU usage was only taken from CD DAE 99, since EAC occupies the system a lot more. As a last note, we used the "BURST" reading mode of EAC. We made a full CD Rip starting from the first to the last track of the CD. The Average DAE reported speed along with the CPU Usage is displayed in the test graphs.

- DAE features:
We used EAC v0.9 prebeta 11 to examine the drive's features. As the program reported, the drive does "Caching" data, "Accurate Stream" and "C2 Error info". The specifications state that the drive can reach up to 40x DAE (max) with both pressed and CDR media.

- Pressed AudioCD results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
The DAE ripping speed of PleXWriter PX-W2410A is superb and outperforms any other 24x CD-RW drive, reaching 30.1X average DAE ripping speed:

- CDR AudioCD Results: (click here to see the CD Speed 99 graph)
During those tests, we faced the most important <bug> of the drive. First we used our usual test discs -made from Taiyo Yuden, which were used in many previous tests without any problems. The drive failed to recognize the contents of the disc! We then tried another test disc, written on a different recorder than the first one, which was a different brand (Verbatim). This time Plextor did recognize the disc with no problems. However our test results weren't much satisfactory, since the drive reached only 32x (max) DAE ripping speed. We tried again making a another AudioCDR -this time from Ricoh, and Plextor PX-W2410A performed very good and reached 30x average ripping speed:

From futher testing we noticed that the drive denied recognize almost all Taiyo Yuden inserted media, which the PX-W2410A drive had burned...We also saw problems recognizing our test disc for the "BAD DAE Tests" - made from Princo.

- Advanced DAE Quality

The PleXWriter PX-W2410A, completed the Nero CD Speed "Advanced DAE test" successfully and it got 100 (perfect) quality score. Also as Nero CD Speed reports the drive supports reading of CD-Text and from thelead in/out area. The tested disc came from Mitsui SG Ultra II 74min 24x.

Despite the good results with the Mitsui media we done additional tests with Ricoh 74min 24x media. This time the results were slight different. How? Lets see the first picture. This time Plextor makes 100 score BUT with only 24.08X average reading speed.

Let's try again to read the same media. This time the drive reads with maximum speed but now produces a lot of data errors...

Which test result we should take as the most accurate for our tests?..We don't know. There seems to be something that needs fixing since it's not possible with different media (written from the same drive) getting so different results (we are talking about a Plextor drive here...)

- Bad CDR Media results

Despite the fact that Nero CD Speed Advanced DAE test stretches drive's mechanism to the max, we decided to do real life tests with a scratched disc. The disc was dirty, and with some light scratches, enough in order to cause problems to most of the tested drives. We have used CD DAE 99 software to rip the whole disc (756539616 sectors) and the results were very interesting:

As the tests showed, the Plextor drive failed to recognize our CDR media for the specific test. The same media have been used for performing other tests and till today no other drive had ever failed at least recognizing it....

- Ripping 90 and 99min CDs

As we can see from the above graphs, the PleXWriter PX-W2410A has no problem reading 90min CDs. However it failed reading our 99min test disc...