Plextor 708A Review

Installation

The 708A is an IDE drive and like most CD/DVD drives the installation was simple. The drive was detected in Windows XP without any problems. Auto insert notification was disabled. We experienced no difficulty or strange behaviour during installation.

Above we have a screen shot from Nero's Infotool 2.07 as it examines the Plextor PX-708A.

It is reporting that the Read speed is: 40 X and write speed is 40 X for CD-R disks. This is faster than any other DVD writer we have reviewed. The buffer of this drive is 2,000KB which is a little small if you want to totally avoid BURNPROOF kicking in during 8X recording IMO.

You can see from above, that it can can also read the DVD Alliance format's "+" disks i.e. DVD+R & DVD+RW but not DVD-RAM disks. The drive supports a buffer underrun protection system for CDs and DVDs and can report C2 errors. Its also reporting that the drive can write CD-Text, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R and CD-RWs disks. The firmware on our drive is 1.03.

The Plextor 708A is also the first DVD writer to support the packet writing standard "Mount Rainier".

The drive's installation was a breeze - it only took 10 minutes from disassembly of the PC to having the DVD burner up and running.

Our review drive is a September 2003 model with TLA #0002 that came shipped with firmware version 1.02. For this review we found an updated firmware at Plextor's website and updated it (to version 1.03).

The software we used for this review was: DiscJuggler 4.01.1002, Nero 6.0.0.23, RecordNow Max 4.51 DX & CloneCD 4.3.17.

The above is a screen shot from Nero 6.0.0.23 and shows us what it finds out about the drive.

We can see that the maximum CD speed is 40x and that it supports cuesheets and DAO/96 writing. It also supports the overburning of CDs and the writing of CD-Text information. The DVD high compatibility option above is used to aid compatibility with certain DVD players (by padding the disk with dummy data to a minimum of 1GB). Nero also gives us an option to disable BURN-Proof.

The Plextor drive have an extra option with Nero not seen elsewhere and that is the option to enable or disable PowerRec. If you disable this it will allow you to disable the burners quality control system and burn your disks at whatever speed you want (disabling this can cause errors on your disk but will enable you to write faster if you know your disks can handle it).

Next we used a new utility called DVDInfoPro which does pretty much the same job as InfoTool but is more comprehensive:

As you can see the drive supports Mount Rainier +RW (for DVDs) and Mount Rainier CD. We can see that it doesn't support HD-Burn - a system developed by Sanyo to store 1.4GB on a normal CD-Recordable.

The above screen shots are from DiscJuggler 4.01.1002 revealing more information.

Using Discjuggler above we can see that the drive can read and write full 96 bytes sub-codes "PQ" & "P to W".

Next using the provided PlexTools Professional 2.06 we examine the different reading and writing speeds of the drive.

Below you can see the different CD read and write speeds, notice the limited CD-RW write speeds :

The DVD read/write speeds the Plextor 708A supports are also shown:

Page 2 - Last Updated: 25 November 2003