The Test System:::...

Western Digital 80GB Special Edition (8MB cache)
512MB Corsair TwinX 3200
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Microsoft WindowsXP Pro + SP1 + DX9.0a
Epox 8RDA3G (nForce2 400 Ultra)

Nero CD Speed:::...

I'm not sure why but I decided to test the CD read speeds before I installed PlexTools and the results were quite interesting. It seems that by default the drive was running at its 14-32x range rather than its maximum 17-40x range.

I spoke to Plextor about this, or more accurately the lovely Sarah from their PR company did and they say this was probably due to some burning software that was already installed when the drive was fitted. That wasn't the case as I used a fresh OS install as I always do but it could conceivably have been some other kind of obscure compatibility thing.

Read

As soon as I installed PlexTools the drive immediately reached its 40x maximum without me doing a thing, in fact it went beyond and made it to 41.47x. If you plan on not using PlexTools my advice is check what speed your drive is running at and if necessary install PlexTools. You can always uninstall it again if you really need to and the speed remains at maximum, yes I tried it.

Maximum Speed Read

Write speeds didn't quite make it to 40x at 39.87x but I'm being picky here, anything over 20x on a DVD burner gets my vote.

Write

Scratched Disk Test:::...

I was curious to see how the Plextor coped with scratched media so ran a surface scan test with both a nicely scuffed CD and also an equally nicely scuffed DVD and compared it to my Optorite which does a pretty good job itself.

CD Scratch Test:::...

Plextor

Optorite

Well, notch this one up to the Plextor! Both damaged and unreadable sector levels were lower on the Plextor than on the Optorite which is impressive.

DVD Test:::...

It should be immediately obvious from the amount of red that a scratched DVD is much more of a challenge to these drives than a scratched CD, in fact I was rather alarmed at how little damage it takes to render large portions of a DVD unreadable. Take my advice and treat your DVDs with care even if you don't manage the same compassion with your CDs.

The same DVD was used in both drives and as you can see performance was very similar, though if we have to pick a winner 12.89% readability of the Optorite beats out the 12.20% of the Plextor.

Plextor

Optorite