Motors & Drives Information

Plextor(R) Corp., a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance CD-related equipment and software, today announced the immediate availability of the 3-in-1 PlexWriter(TM) 16/10/40A drive.

The new internal drive features an E-IDE (ATAPI-4) interface and Plug & Play compatibility, making installation faster and easier than ever before, and enabling end-users to begin copying and sharing files with drag-and-drop simplicity within minutes of opening the box.

The PlexWriter 16/10/40A drive features 16X CD-recording, 10X CD-rewriting, and 40X max CD-playback, making it among the fastest CD-RW drives available on the market today. The 10X-rewrite speed leaps over conventional 4X CD-RW speeds, enabling the PlexWriter to rewrite an entire 650MB disc in approximately six minutes.

The PlexWriter 16/10/40A also features BURN-Proof(TM) (buffer underrun-proof) technology, which ensures fault-tolerant CD burning. BURN-Proof prevents errors from occurring when data flow to the drive is interrupted during the recording process due to slow source-drive performance, PC configuration problems, or when running other applications. By allowing users to surf the Web, download files, and utilize other applications while a CD records in the background, this error-reducing technology makes CD-recording more practical than ever before.

"With 40X max playback speed, the PlexWriter 16/10/40A qualifies as a full-time replacement for an existing CD-ROM or CD-R drive," said Howard Wing, vice president of sales and marketing for Plextor. "This high-speed drive provides both professionals and power-users with the ideal solution for such advanced applications as recording audio CDs, archiving small and large data files, or creating multimedia productions."

PlexWriter 16/10/40A Drive

Based on an award-winning platform, the versatile 3-in-1 PlexWriter 16/10/40A lets users write, rewrite, and read compact discs at a variety of speeds. It records CD-R discs at 16X (2.4 MB/sec), 12X (1.8 MB/sec), 8X (1.2 MB/sec), or 4X (600 KB/sec) speeds. The Plextor drive plays back both CD-R and CD-ROM discs at speeds ranging from 4X (600 KB/sec) to 40X (6.0 MB/sec). CD-RW media can be recorded at 10X (1.5 MB/sec), 8X (1.2 MB/sec), 4X (600 KB/sec), or 2X (300 KB/sec), and read back at 32X max (4.8 MB/sec). The PlexWriter 16/10/40A also extracts audio CDs at 40x (6 MB/sec).

The internal PlexWriter 16/10/40A drive with E-IDE (ATAPI-4) Interface includes a data buffer capacity of 2 MB. Average random access time is a very fast 140ms and burst transfer rates are 16.6 MB/second (PIO Mode 4/DMA Mode 2). The drive supports a wide variety of writing modes, including Track-at-Once, Disc-at-Once, Session-at-Once, Multisession, and variable/fixed packet writing.

Complete Suite of Software Included

The internal PlexWriter 16/10/40A is Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME Plug & Play compatible. The retail package for the PlexWriter 16/10/40A includes several valuable software applications for an enhanced "out-of-the-box" customer experience. Plextor Manager 2000(TM) is a comprehensive suite of 32-bit software utilities that allows users to control audio management, playback, recording, and drive settings:

Music Video Producer 2000 (MVP2000(TM)) handles playback of music and video files. This CD-DA and digital A/V player can be used to create a digital jukebox and customized playlists for MP3, WMA, WAV files and CD audio tracks. Once the user has created individual playlists, recording an audio CD from the playlist is as simple as a mouse click. The resulting audio or CD TEXT discs can be played on home, car, portable, or PC CD players. A link to the Internet CDDB database from MVP 2000 supplies album, song, and artist information during playback for most commercially available CDs.

DiscDupe 2000(TM) allows users to backup CDs directly to the PlexWriter 16/10/40A with "bit-by-bit" accuracy using the Session-at-Once recording method. Audio Capture 2000(TM) allows users to capture audio tracks from the CD to the hard disk as WAV files or to encode tracks as Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. A track selection window shows at a glance all necessary information about the source disc. Single or multiple tracks can be extracted at once. Audio Capture 2000 supports sampling rates of 44 kHz, 22 kHz, and 11 kHz, 8-bit or 16-bit resolution, and stereo or monaural sound for WAV and 64kbit or 128kbit rates for WMA files. With CDDB support in Audio Capture 2000, WMA files are encoded with song, artist, and album information as part of the file.

AudioFS(TM) displays audio CDs to operating systems and applications as WAV files. It eliminates the need to store large files on a hard disk, allowing applications to access the tracks from the audio CD directly through AudioFS. AudioFS allows easy drag and drop of audio tracks to a hard disk for a simple and quick audio extraction to WAV format. It also allows fast and easy encoding of WAV files to a number of compression formats, such as MP3, WMA, and Real Audio, with third party software.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:32 AM