Install & Setup

Default Woes

Once I got the drive was out of the box it was a breeze to set up (I tend to have difficulty with boxes). Factory default settings will work just fine if this is the only SCSI device in your setup. At the time of installation my system already had one SCSI drive. My harddrive was on the U2W LVD chain and that left the Plextor with its own connection on the SCSI card through the 68-pin UW interface. Cabling was a breeze, as I was only going to have one UW drive, and I had no need to change the default settings.

After putting the drive into my system, I encountered a mild setback. The drive did not come set with the factory default settings, an odd and annoying abnormality. I was baffled for a little while, but the guys at Plextor tech support were able to help me out, (nice chaps and rather knowledgeable to boot). This drive has to have some of the most thorough documentation I have seen in a long time. After I realized the drive settings were initially wrong, I was able to remedy the problem with a little jumper movement. Installing into a dual boot system was not particularly difficult, and the Plextor didn't require any extra steps for either of the operating systems.

Plextor also provides firmware upgrades through its website. You can pretty much depend on these guys for support, as many of their products go into mission critical systems that need to be alive or some little techie dies. I noticed that Plextor had a new firmware update and proceeded to install it. No problems there, just a matter of running the executable file.

Suite or Sweet?

The drive also comes with the Plextor software suite, Plextor Manager 2000. The software consists of a multimedia program, an audio ripping program and a handy little program for disc duplication. Installing the software was not a particularly taxing process. Anybody familiar with the process of clicking on the install icon and hitting "next" a few times shouldn't have too much trouble. I do have qualms with the implementation of the software, nothing terribly huge though. The software places itself in the startup sequence. I generally have a problem with programs that load themselves every time the computer boots-up, as they take up resources that I so value. I highly doubt most people duplicate discs and rip audio every time they boot up their computer. In my eyes, a simple folder in the start menu would have sufficed.

Plextor Software Suite

The multimedia software isn't anything to rave about. If you already use software like Winamp it is doubtful you will switch. The Plextor player lacks the little niceties of Winamp to make me switch. The program itself seems to work just fine for what it does, just beware of it stealing your file associations in case you don't intend to use it. The program doesn't ask for permission first, which is very annoying.

Plextor Disc Dupe is a great little application; the sheer simplicity of the program is genius. Note that you also have to have a Plextor CD-R to use Disc Dupe. To use the program you place a blank disc in the burner and the disc to be copied into the 40X drive. Then you simply click on the little create CD icon. The program does offer two different duplication methods: CD to CD, CD to Image, and Image to CD, . I tried out the most taxing method, in my eyes, and that was the CD to CD. The copy attempt went through with flying colors, the disc was replicated at 8X while I was still using the computer for other tasks such as browsing and playing MP3s.