When burning a CD-ROM, most CD-RW or CD-R drive users are afraid even to breathe on the system for fear of the dreaded buffer underrun error. Such a glitch in the process means a waste of half an hour and another useless coaster. Enter the Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32A ($300 street). Not only does this internal ATAPI drive offer an unprecedented combination of speed (12X write, 10X rewrite, and 32X read), but it's also the first to implement Sanyo's BURN-Proof (Buffer UnderRun Proof) technology, which ensures fault-tolerant CD burning.
Jul 19, 2000 Audio fans will love this drive's pacesetting digital audio extraction.
The buffer underrun occurs when the CD-RW drive's write buffer cannot be filled fast enough with the data from the source drive. When there's no more data to write in the drive's buffer, the CD-burning process comes to a premature halt. Often the cause is the interruption of the CPU by another application or by other system resources contending for the same data bus. In the event of buffer underrun, the BURN-Proof feature remedies the problem in three steps.
First, the technology stops the burn. Second, it waits for the buffer to refill. And third, it locates the last written frame in the spiral track and resumes the recording process. The Plextor drive also increases the chances of a successful burn with its media-detection feature, which identifies the type of blank media and adjusts the CD writing strategy according to the media's specification. In testing, the Plextor drive successfully burned a CD at 12X while i-Bench 1. Cherry Keyboard Opos Driver. 5 was running in the backgrounda Web-based test that taxes the CPU and hard drive heavily. If such a stress can run while a CD is burning, casually browsing the Web should not even cause the Plextor drive to blink. None of the CD-RW drives we reviewed in our last round-up (March 21) passed this test.