Plextor 716A Review

Installation

The 716A 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.

Above we have a screen shot from Nero's Infotool 2.27.

It is reporting that the Read speed is: 40 X and write speed is 48 X for CD-R disks (the read speed has been limited to reduce noise and can be unlocked). Plextor have now increased the buffer to 8MB of this drive compared to the 2,000KB which previous generations had.

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.

Mount Rainier is now not supported (unlike the 708A) and DVD-RAM writing/reading is not supported. The firmware on our drive is 1.02. You can also see that the drive supports reading and writing to DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) disks now.

Our review drive is a November 2004 model with TLA #0202 that came shipped with firmware version 1.02. A new version was available and used 1.03 for some of the tests.

The software we used for this review was: Nero 6.6.0.3, RecordNow Max 4.51 DX & CloneCD 5. The following is a screen shot from Nero 6.6.0.3 and shows us what it discovers about the drive:

We can see that the maximum CD speed is 48x (and not 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 Plextor 716 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).

You can see that the drive also allows you to alter the drives Book Type setting. This allows the drive to flag +R/+RW media with a DVD-ROM identifier setting, this is needed because some older DVD players do not recognise disks that identify themselves as "+R" & "+RW". Disks recorded on -R / -RW do not need to use this setting as they have been around longer and are approved by the DVD forum.

SUPPORTED FEATURES - DISKINFOPRO / DISCJUGGLER / PLEXTOOLS

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

PLEXTOOLS PROFESSIONAL

Next using the provided PlexTools Professional 2.18 we examined the different reading and writing speeds of the drive.

From the various tools we used to interrogates the drive we can see from the screenshots that Mount Rainer is NOT supported now. The 716A can read CDs at 48 speed in mode 1 only and 40 speed in other modes. It can rewrite CDs at 4 speed on normal CDRW disks, 10 speed on high-speed HSRW disks and 24 speed on ultra-speed USRW disks. For its DVD-ROM reading ability the drive will only read up to 16 speed on single layer disks and 12 speed on other types of disks.

It can write DVD "-" and "+" disks at 16 speed - you can also see it has the fastest rewritable speed for DVD+RW disks at 8 speed and it writes to dual layer 8.5GB disks at 4 speed.

Page 2 - Last Updated: 6 January 2005