Plextor Plexwriter Premium CD Rewriter review

For years everything in the world of computers has been getting faster and faster.

Until recently, CD writers were no exception. With Plextor's Plexwriter Premium, however, it looks as if we've come to the end of the road. Manufacturers just can't make their drives spin any quicker, and even if they could, why bother? CD Writers are already so fast that you barely have time to take a sip of tea while your CD is burning, let alone make a cup.

The Plexwriter is sold as a 52-speed writer, although its default speed is 40x. In 52x mode, your discs will be spinning more than 10,000 times a second, making the drive noisier and shortening its lifespan. Scratched CDs could even explode. Even at 40x, though, the Plexwriter makes short work of CD-R burning. It took only 2min 40sec to write our 500MB of test files. Using packet writing, (which lets you drag and drop files on to a CD as you would on to a floppy) the same files transferred to a formatted CD-R/W in just over four minutes. This is good, but it's not spectacular.

The Plexwriter is also packed with features, some of which are useful. PoweRec, for example, slows the drive when recording if the blank disc you're using is a bit dodgy. This should mean you waste fewer CDs. The Plexwriter's Silent Mode also decelerates the drive, this time making it quieter. If you've put a lot of effort into making the rest of your system run quietly, the last thing you want is a CD writer that whines like a jet engine. Unfortunately not all the features are so practical. GigaRec, which is supposed to let you fit a gigabyte of data on one CD, slows the Plexwriter right down to run at a lethargic 4x, instead of 40x, and the resulting disc can only be read by the Plexwriter. What's more, PowerRec, while a good safeguard, was a little over-sensitive, slowing the drive even for the good disc that Plextor provided in the box.

If you feel you need lots of fancy options when you burn CDs, the Plexwriter is for you. But given that you can get drives with similar specifications for less than fifty quid, the extra bells and whistles don't really justify the price.