Plextor 716A Review

CD-ROM READ TESTS

CD-ROM READ

We next tested the drives ability to handle pressed CD-ROMs.

As you can see from above, the drive managed an average speed of 32.08 speed using CAV. Towards the end of the CD it managed 42.58x. The 716A has very low CPU usage and the IDE burst rate was good as well.

CD-R READ

The Plextor's ability to read CD-R is not as good as we would have liked - around the 50min mark it dropped its speed to 4 speed.

The average CD-R recordable data reading speed was only 18.67 using CAV..

CD-RW DATA READ

Manufacturer : Verbatim
Code : 97m34s24f
Disc Type : UltraSpeed CD-RW
Usage : General
Recording Layer : Phase Change
Recording Speed : 24 X
Capacity : 79:59.74
703 MB

Here we find the the Plextor handles our CDRW disk pretty well - it averages 32.20 speed and reaches 42.49 towards the end of the disk.

CD-ROM AUDIO READ

For this test we used a pressed AUDIO-CD and examined the drive's ability to read audio.

The drive performs well in this test with a perfect 10 score and an average 30.81x speed - it did 40.88x (toward the end of the disk).

CD-R ADVANCED DAE QUALITY

The drive managed an average speed of 29.99 and it's quality was 100 (perfect). The 716A is capable of reading CD-TEXT and reading subchannel data and it also managed to read data from the leadin and lead-out areas (which very few drives can). As shown above, the drive is good for feeding a burner at 16 speed on the fly. It scored perfectly in this test.

CD-R 99Min READING

Our standard 99-min disks failed to read in, but luckily we had a backup and this was read without any problems. Other than this the 716A gave a good performance when it came to reading 99min media.

C2 ERROR REPORTING

Next we examined the ability of the drive to accurately extract audio information. This is aided by something called C2 error information which is on a CD. If your drive can report C2 information then it will be faster and more accurate at ripping audio. We used Exact Audio Copy 0.95 b5's "Detect Read Features" option to examine what the drive could do:

Page 3 - Last Updated: 6 January 2005