Plextor Ships Fast, Writable Combo Drive
PlexCombo boosts CD recording to 20x, includes DVD reader.Melissa Perenson, PCWorld.com
Plextor this week released the PlexCombo, the first combination drive to support 20X CD-Recording along with providing a DVD reader.
The 20/10/40-12A internal optical disc drive supports 10X CD-Rewriting, and playback speeds of 40X-max CD-ROM and 12X-max DVD-ROM. It carries a suggested retail price of $229, slightly more expensive than buying a similarly rated CD-RW drive and a 16X DVD-ROM drive separately.
Plextor is not the first company to release a combination CD-RW writer and DVD-ROM reader, but it is the first to achieve these write and rewrite speeds.
Earlier this year, LG Electronics released the GCC-4120B, a 12X/8X/32X CD-RW drive with an 8X DVD-ROM reader. Other companies that have ventured into the combo market--at similar or slower speeds--include Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, and Samsung. Also this week, Pioneer announced the DVR-A04, a combination DVD/CD-R and CD-RW drive. It is scheduled to ship in late March at a suggested retail price of $499.
HP recently announced a pair of combination rewritable DVD and CD drives that support write-once DVD+R as well as DVD+RW. The internal DVD200i and external DVD200e are scheduled to ship in May. However, while those drives have recordable and rewritable DVD support, the CD-R write speeds are not as fast as Plextor's entry.
Combo Advantages
Unlike the earlier drives, Plextor's is the first to be able to burn to CD-Rs at 20X; that translates into about a 2-minute time saving for each full 650MB CD-R. And even though the drive's speed rating is half that of the current high-end 40X-generation drives, the real-world difference between the two is also only about 2 minutes.
A combo drive is particularly useful to those who are upgrading an older system that lacks both CD-RW and DVD-ROM. Likewise, a combo drive is ideal for upgrading systems that have few available drive bays.
"It gives them the benefit of having DVD-ROM readability in a single device," says Howard Wing, vice president of sales and marketing at Plextor, of the combo drive's primary advantage.
Plextor's half-height combination drive drops into a standard PC drive bay and can be installed either vertically or horizontally. The PlexCombo connects by E-IDE (ATAPI) to any desktop computer, whether PC or Mac. It is Plug and Play compatible with multiple versions of Windows, including XP.
Traditionally, Plextor has been focused on CD-ROM and CD-RW drives.
"We've never had a DVD-ROM product before," says Wing. "But, over the last year and a half, two years, I've had repeated e-mails from users asking us for a DVD-ROM product."