Plextor's PX-712SA Dual-Format DVD+/- SATA Drive

Name: Plextor's PX-712SA Dual-Format DVD+/- SATA Drive - Page 2
Brand: Plextor's

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, August 02, 2004, 11:00 PM EDT

HH Test System and Drive Capabilities

The HotHardware Test Machine

Snazzy

Hardware

Plextor PX-712SA DVD+/- R/RW
Artec Dual DVD+/-R/RW

Albatron 875P Motherboard
Pentium 4-C @ 2.4GHz.
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900XT
512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 CAS 2
Integrated Audio
Western Digital ATA100 30GB - 7200RPM
VIA 4-in-1 v4.51
DirectX 9.0b

Utilities and Media Used For Testing

Nero InfoTool
Nero CD DAE
Nero CD-DVD Speed
An audio CD 44:08:02 in Length for DAE Tests

3.9GB of MP3 files for all DVD Data Read Tests
677MB AVI file for All CD Data Read Tests
Underworld on DVD for all DVD Movie Tests
Media Used:
-Maxell 40X CD-R
-Memorex 4x DVD-R
-TDK 4X DVD+R

Nero InfoTool:

Before we start running our tests, we should take a minute to assess the drive's underlying feature set. To do this we used Nero InfoTool.

Plextor PX-712SA

Artec Dual DVD

The PX-712SA covers the spectrum of capabilities nicely. The only features not supported are DVD-RAM or DVD+R DL (Dual Layer). Other than that, the drive sports a wide array of features for maximum flexibility and compatibility. You may notice that the drive reported a top CD speed of 48X, however, Plextor sets the drive to run at 40X by default, the top speed they recommend CD media run at without incurring any errors. This is achieved by implementing their SpeedRead Technology which locks CD reads to 40X and DVD movie playback to 2X. For testing CD-R performance we set the drive to run at the top speed for CDs. We will show the differences with DVD movie playback further on.