The Plextor Premium 52/32/52 Hi-Performance Internal CD-RW Drive
Exceptionally Fast Performance For Professionals

Jason R. Gibson
July 14, 2003

Hot Hardware's Test System Mid-Range Pentium 4 Performance

Benchmarks  with The PlexWriter 40/12/40U Tonight in the center ring... Internal vs. External...

Before we get to the actual benchmarks, we would like to note that only the latest version of Nero Burning Rom acknowledged the presence of the PlexWriter Premium as a CD-RW Drive.  With older versions of Nero, we were only presented with the option of burning a CD using the "Image Recorder" directly to the hard drive, even though Windows recognized the drive as a CD-RW.  Nero users should upgrade before installing this drive.

Nero InfoTool:

To start things off, we used Nero's swank "InfoTool" program to snag a description of each of the drives capabilities. For comparison, we have chosen to put the Plextor Premium up against a few of its predecessors, the PlexWriter 48x24x48 external USB 2.0 CD-RW and the internal PlexWriter 48x24x48. Using all relativity new drives, we figure this will shed some light on the question, "is it really worth the money to upgraded from a 48x unit?" Looking over the three pictures above, one can see that these three drives are very similar. They all sport the same basic features, the only thing that separates them is the different firmware versions and of course, the speed difference of the PlexWriter Premium.

You may notice that the maximum read speeds of all three drives are reported as 40x.  This is not a mistake, Plextor has set this as a "safety" measure to aid in excessive vibration and limit the chance of CD's shattering when maximum rotation speeds are reached. One can get around this safety feature by simply enabling "SpeedRead." Simply press and hold the eject button for three second, before you place your media into the drive, and "SpeedRead" is activated.  (SpeedRead activation is indicated by the drive activity light blinking four times).

For the following set of benchmarks, SpeedRead was enabled. A retail copy of a Quake 3 CD was used for the data transfer tests and a 73 min audio CD was used for the audio transfer tests .

SiSoft SANDRA:

As you can see from the data above, the external USB drive actually outperformed both of the internal drives in the SANDRA CD/DVD File System Benchmark. We find this surprising considering that external drives are typically slower then internal drives.

Nero CD Speed - Data:

For the next set of tests, we fried up Nero CD Speed to test the overall performance of the drives while reading a pressed data CD. As expected, the PlexWriter Premium came out on top speed wise with an average read speed of 35.35x, followed by the External unit at 29.60x and lastly the internal 48x with a speed of 28.99x. Before we move on, we would like to note the drop in read speed for the Premium unit that can clearly be seen on the graph. We ran this test multiple times, after fresh reboots, drive cleanings, CD cleanings, etc. but the problem was persistent. We finally disabled SpeedRead, and the problem disappeared. Upon further investigation, we found that we are not the only ones that have noticed this problem. We have e-mailed Plextor and will surely post an update when we receive a concise answer to this problem. Getting back to the benchmark, we were surprised again by the External unit.  It edged out the others in the Seek Time test, while the Internal 48x took the lead in Burst Rates with 20 MB/s.

Nero CD Speed - Audio:

During this part of testing, all three drives faired better with the audio disk. Yet again, the PlexWriter Premium topped the other two drives with a very fast average read speed of 38.77x, followed by the External unit with a very respectable 31.53x and lastly the internal 48x with a speed of 31.48x. Following the same pattern as the previous test, the External drive took the lead in Seek Times, while the Premium and Internal 48x tied with a Burst Rate of 16 MB/s.

MP3 Encoding With Nero Express:

Using the same Audio CD from the test above, we proceeded to rip all 18 tracks to the hard drive of our test system using the mp3PRO Encoder Plug-in that is included with the Nero software. For the numbers below, we timed the process from the moment we clicked "Go" until the encoding was complete.

Though the Internal 48x unit came out on top, this is most likely due to the problem the Premium drive is having with sustaining a high data transfer speed across the entire surface of a CD (thus the lower then expected Burst Rate in the data transfer test).

Disc Copy with Nero 5.5.10.280

For the last part of testing, we burned a single 600MB zip file to a CD using Nero 5.5.10.280. It still amazes us that different CD media affect burn times so drastically. This is where the PlexWriter Premium really shines. Averaging a burn time of 2:40 seconds to burn an entire 600MB file is impressive. We have heard reports of this drive having issues with some 52x media, but we personally did not encounter any with the six Verbatim disks we ran through the drive. The Burn quality of the media was also impressive. This drive did not product a single "coaster" throughout all of our testing, even when we tried to produce one by heavily multitasking with our test system.

Conclusion and Final Remarks