Installation
Installing the drive was very straight forward. If you are experienced in optical drive installation, you know it's a piece of cake. If you're not, don't worry - the little Quick Installation Guide walks you through it. The drive should be immediately recognized by your OS if you are using Windows 2000 or XP. However, if you are using Windows ME, NT, 95/98 or 98SE, OS2, Win3.1x, DOS, or Microsoft Bob - you may have to access the Plextor website for tips on how to get things rolling.
Test Setup
Plextor generously sent two of these drives to be tested in tandem, one engineering sample (firmware 0.AA), and one retail unit (firmware 1.00). Test results are from the retail drive, although it does not matter because I tested them both and found there to be only about a +/-1% variance in any test esult between the two. Additionally, I was happy to have two of them so I could report authentic drive-to-drive (Quick Copy in Nero) results.
The test rig:
FX-55 @ stock 2.6GHz
A8V Dlx rev2.0 (BIOS 1009.006/VIA Hyperion 4.55's)
2 Gigs (TWINX2048-3200C2) @ 3-3-3-10
2x36GB SATA WD Raptors (on-board Promise RAID0)
1 x PX-230A CD-R/RW Master IDE0 (Retail - firmware v1.00) UDMA Mode2
1 x PX-230A CD-R/RW Master IDE1 (Eng. Sample - firmware 0.AA) UDMA Mode2
Windows XP Pro sp2
DirectX 9.0c
SB Audigy2 ZS
Radeon X800 XT PE
To test the drives I used Nero CD-DVD Speed from the Nero Toolkit. Ritek Dye Type 7: Short Strategy (Phthalocyanine) 52x printable CD-R's were used for all reads, writes, and re-writes. These discs are very common as they are repacked and sold under major brand names (i.e. Memorex, etc.).
Results
Spin-up and Spin-down times both were 4s.
Load + Recognition times for data and audio CD's were 10s.
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Creating the Nero test CD directly from HDD to PX-230A took only 2m31s. The brief dip at the end showed a slower ending speed of 32.29x, but if you look at the graph you'll see we had easily made it off the chart into the 52x zone just prior to the dip. The average xfer rate wasn't affected to much at all by this, coming in @ 39x.
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On the data CD tests, again the xfer speed was very good, easily reaching (over) 52x by the end with an average speed of almost 40x. Take a look at the seek times; maybe if I lived my life at hyper-speed and everything around me slowed waaaay dowwwn (like in The Matrix), then seek times reported in milliseconds might bother me. This is not the case, however, so the seek times rock. CPU usage looks very good ranging from 0% to 5% at speeds up to 8x.
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Audio CD testing showed a smooth CAV xfer rate that started at 22.76x and ended at 51.45x, giving an average of 40x - right on par with the majority of well performing 52x burners on the market. (Go here for an extensive listing of various manufacturers drive results). A key factor to consider here is the DAE score of 10 (out of 10). This is Digital Audio Extraction. Nero explains DAE as follows:
[blockquote] [i]"The DAE Quality Test measures how well the drive can extract audio tracks. First some audio sectors are extracted to the HD at three different locations on the CD. The same sectors are read again and compared to the sectors written to HD. Depending on the number of differences, the DAE quality will be rated from 0 to 10.10 means perfect DAE (no differences)."[/i] [/blockquote]
Advanced DAE tests showed 0 data errors, 0 sync errors, and a quality score of 100 (out of 100) at an average xfer speed of just over 37x. On The Fly Copying tests all passed perfectly ranging at speeds from 1x to 16x. One small thing did catch my eye in these tests; look at the CPU usage at 4X. 11% seems unusually high relative to the other speeds - but still, nowhere near approaching a level of concern.
Real World Performance
The Nero tests don't give results for any kind of quality measurements at 52x, but I can tell you this; I copied STYX Greatest Hits on-the-fly at 52x from the engineering sample to the retail unit. That is 75m21s (761MB) worth of audio data duped in 2m53s - and upon playback it was flawless (unless you don't like STYX - then I guess you'd have a bone to pick).
What about Re-Write performance? Well, as you know, RW performance always takes a speed hit, thus the lower RW xfer rating of 32x. I did not run any sophisticated tests here, but I did successfully write, erase, and re-write data without incident. Remember that the "quick erase" option in your burning software leaves old data on the disc even though it will appear to be empty. If you're not concerned about that data, or the security thereof then it's not a problem. If you want to be sure, on the other hand, that your files are completely erased, use the "full erase" option - it takes longer, but ensures the data is physically erased from the disc.
Noise
As I mentioned earlier, Plextor drives have a reputation for being quiet while hard at work. The PX-230A is by no means an annoyingly loud drive, but it is not as quiet as the virtually silent PX-708A, PX-712A, or PX-716A. If you have used any of these other drives, you know what I mean - they are very quiet. So, the PX-230A gets marked down in this category - but just a little since there are much louder high-pitch whiners out there in the optical drive marketplace. I would put it this way; when spinning at 52x the drive quietly "whirs" - but that is about it. If you have any case fans running at all, you probably will barely notice it. I should also mention that the door opens and closes very smoothly and quietly - no sudden lurching open or closed.
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