supported drives

[Garry A. Leslie]

Hey All,
I bought the Plextor 760A.
Had to upgrade Microstudio, because it wouldn't work with the previous version, and had problems with the latest version of Hoster, not recognizing it at first.
Miraculously it all sorted itself out, without any help, don't know how or why but it has worked great ever since.
Plenty of older drives are aways available cheaply on Ebay.
Only trouble with DVD drives is their speeds are nowhere near as fast as the fastest CD drives, and when using other programmes which actually show you the processing speed, they are shown to work at about half or less of their advertised speed.
I have only ever had one Plextor drive that wouldn't work with MTU products, for some reason MTU never supported that particular drive.
Regards from across the pond.
Garry

[gpayne]

I have bought 3 Plextor drives from MTU. I have not had problems with the drives until MTU changed the code and made Hoster check to see if the drive had hardware decoding. In previous versions you had the option to use hardware decoding or software decoding. The reason was that some disks would import and be snowy or have flakes etc. in the displayed lyrics. With my Plextor premium and my Plextor 716A there were times when I needed to select one or the other modes to get perfect imports. I wish they had never changed that but I believe a lot of people might have been getting confused on which mode to use or even how to select it. It is easier to let their sotware dectect hardware decoding if it is available on your particular drive. However, I am not sure that you would want to use hardware or software decoding under every circumstance. I would rather have the option to choose depending upon if I have a disk that imports with snow etc. Currently all of the drives that I bought from MTU are working. The Plextor 760A is the slowest of the bunch, but still does the import. It will not do great imports unless the import speed is set to 6x. While you can help make the import go well by selecting a slower speed, I would still like the option to hardware or software decode during import.

See ya

gpayne

[WDEWDAD7]

So, what is the best Plextor drive?? The previous post stated that the 760A imports slow. Is the 716A the best? The Premium? I am kind of relying on the forum to give me some insight, before I buy another drive. So far, each Plextor drive has lasted about a year or so. Is this normal? Some more feed back would be appreciated, if no one minds. I thank everyone in advance for this.

[billyo]

Originally Posted by WDEWDAD7

So, what is the best Plextor drive?? The previous post stated that the 760A imports slow. Is the 716A the best? The Premium? I am kind of relying on the forum to give me some insight, before I buy another drive. So far, each Plextor drive has lasted about a year or so. Is this normal? Some more feed back would be appreciated, if no one minds. I thank everyone in advance for this.

my opinion plextor is still the best drive, i have a 716 ext. and i havent had any problems with it..i've been using it isince i started using hoster

[mindonstrike]

Originally Posted by WDEWDAD7

So, what is the best Plextor drive?? The previous post stated that the 760A imports slow. Is the 716A the best? The Premium? I am kind of relying on the forum to give me some insight, before I buy another drive. So far, each Plextor drive has lasted about a year or so. Is this normal? Some more feed back would be appreciated, if no one minds. I thank everyone in advance for this.

Sorry I don't have a lot of insight into this. The only plextors I have are the ones noted in my signature. After 3 years they still work like champs but of course being that they are becoming technologicly old they'll start getting less and less support from the software industry.
At some point here I'm sure Ill have to start searching for replacements just to keep up.

Sam

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by WDEWDAD7

So, what is the best Plextor drive?? The previous post stated that the 760A imports slow. Is the 716A the best? The Premium? I am kind of relying on the forum to give me some insight, before I buy another drive. So far, each Plextor drive has lasted about a year or so. Is this normal? Some more feed back would be appreciated, if no one minds. I thank everyone in advance for this.

Daryl, the slowness is a software problem not the drives themselves. the 760 is the fastest drive they have made yet. I have both a 716 and a 760 and they are both good. The next version of Hoster, as Admin said will be out by the end of the month and you should see a remarkable improvement. Wait and see. If you still have problems after that then buy a 760.

[Garry A. Leslie]

Hey All,
If you read the technical press reviews, you will find that Plextor 716 and 718
drives got a lot of negative criticism for not being able to produce either the speeds claimed or the quality.
They were also comparitively more expensive, of course Plextor have always charged premium rates for their products, believing "if it ain't expensive it can't be any good".
I had a 52x speed CD Plextor writer, unfortunately not supported by MTU.
So the current 760 drive at 48x speed is about as fast as anything currently on the market, but remember speeds claimed are only ever in short bursts and generally are processing at a much lower speed.
As I previously remarked DVD writers seem to have less impressive speeds than the Cd writers we all once used.
So if you don't especially want to re-produce DVDs, find a cheaper Cd writer, they're going on Ebay for giveaway prices.
I still have a 24/10/24 which still performs very well after almost 5 years and have never yet had a Plextor drive that has given up on me.
Regards from across the pond.
Garry