Plextor 708A Review

DVD Capabilities P1

DVD Read Performance

For our read tests we tried various flavours of DVD recordable media, which included: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RAM and a pressed DVD-ROM disk.

DVD-R Read Test

Firstly we checked its performance with a DVD-R disk using Nero CD Speed (DVD Speed incorporated):

The 708A showed a good result in this test and averaged 5.93 X throughout the disk and peaked at 7.94 X towards the end. Although the specs state that it can read DVD-ROMs at 12 speed, that is only for pressed DVD-ROMs. The seek times are very low (which is a good thing).

DVD-RW Read Test

The 708A's reading of DVD-RW was good. Above you can see it averaged 6.10X and managed to peak to 8.15 towards the end of the disk beating its "-R" read result.

DVD-ROM Single Layer Read Test

The 708A performs well and within specification by averaging 9.04 speed, as you can see above the drive managed to achieve its stated 12 speed towards the end of the disk. It uses CAV mode to read DVD-ROMs.

DVD+RW Read Test

It averaged 6.08 X speed and reached 8.12 x towards the end of our Verbatim DVD+RW test disk.

DVD+R Read Test

The 708A managed an average of 6.07 X speed with our "+R" disk using CAV. The Plextor reads DVD recordable media at 8 speed CAV and the tests above show this.

ERROR CORRECTION - SCRATCHED DVDS

[ This test is new and is added much later than when this review was originally released. ]

Noone manages to keep CD/DVDs in pristine condition so in this test we compared how the Plextor copes with scratches and unreadable data. Different drives handle scratched / unreadable DVDs differently - some can take hours to read in data, whilst others have inferior error correction abilities and can only read limited data from the disk. Toshiba DVD-ROMs from Japan (not the new Samsung made ones) were regarded as good fast readers.

For this test we used a disk with 3 scratches, ink, finger prints, dust on a Ritek disk and we used Nero CD-DVD speed disk's scan disk function under "surface scan" mode to find out how much was unreadable.

Plextor 708A

Good: 89.54 %
Damaged: 0.00 %
Unreadable: 10.46 %

The Plextor didn't fair too well in this test, it took over 2 hours to read our DVD and constantly slowed down to read the disk. The final unreadable count was 10.46% (lower is better).

DVD-RAM Caddy-less Reading

We checked how it behaved with a DVD-RAM disk out of its caddy (the Toshiba SDM-1612 DVD-ROM can read DVD-RAM disks like this). The 708A can not recognise DVD-RAM disks (very few drives can).

DVD CSS Video Ripping

Next we examined the speed at which the drive could rip movies with the content scrambling system (CSS).

The Plextor 708A drive has two modes for DVD Ripping: playback & full speed. If the drive is using playback mode then your movies will only rip at 2 X speed:

To enable the drive to rip CSS protected movies at full speed make sure that the drive is empty and the tray is closed. Then press AND hold the drive's eject button until you see the LED flash green (about 5 seconds). When you release the eject button the tray will open - the next disk you place will be ripped at full speed (it will reset back to playback mode when you press the eject button or lose power).

I 15:38:03 Found 1 DVD RW!
I 15:38:18 Operation Started!
I 15:38:18 Source Device: [1:0:0] PLEXTOR DVDR PX-708A 1.03 (D:)
I 15:38:18 Destination Folder: C:\ULTIMATE_T2\VIDEO_TS\
I 15:38:18 Detect Mastering Errors: No
I 15:38:18 Fast Error Skip: No
I 15:38:18 File Splitting: By File
I 15:38:18 Multi Angle Processing: No
I 15:38:18 Remove Macrovision Protection: Yes
I 15:38:18 Stream Processing: No
I 15:55:57 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:17:38
I 15:55:57 Average Read Rate: 7,654 KB/s (5.5x) - Maximum Read Rate: 11,087 KB/s (8.0x)

Panasonic LF-D311 Average Rip Speed: 5.8 x

Philips DVDRW228k Average Rip Speed: 2.2 x

Pioneer DVR-A04 Average Rip Speed: 1.9 x

Pioneer DVR-A05 Average Rip Speed: 1.8 x

Plextor 708A Average Rip Speed: 5.5 x

The Plextor 708A is very good at ripping DVD movies (much better than Pioneer drives) and managed an average of 5.5 X speed when unlocked.

Page 5 - Last Updated: 31 December 2004