Plextor 708A: First exclusive look at 8X DVD+R

Burning

Click to enlarge.

There you have it, 8X DVD+R — exactly 8 minutes to burn 4.38GB. CD Speed incorrectly identifies the 8X Z-CLV (zone constant linear velocity) mode as 6X CLV due to PoweRec. As you may have read on the previous page, PoweRec redefines the laser intensity and spin at its own discretion.

However, we do have a complaint or two about the tiny buffer on the drive. During the above burn, we did not touch the PC at all. Below is a graph of 4X DVD+R media while we had a Microsoft Office document open. The spikes are the points where we saved the sub-100kb document. We are happy that the burn did not under-run; but, has optical storage taken a step backward?

Click to enlarge.

Below are the CD-R, CD+RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW speed tests. We used CD Speed with the same configuration as the previous test.

	Average Transfer	Media Length
Imation 52X CDR Data CD	29.31X	79.49.74
PNY 52X CDR Data CD	29.24X	79.49.74
Mitsubishi 32X CDRW Data CD	23.78X	73:43.00
Mitsubishi 24X CDRW Data CD	23.66X	73:43.00
FujiFilm 4X DVD-R Data CD	4.01X	4.38GB
TDK 4X DVD-R Data CD	4.00X	4.38GB
FujiFilm 4X DVD+R Data CD	7.70X	4.38GB
Imation 4X DVD+R Data CD	7.69X	4.38GB
FujiFilm 4X DVD-RW Data CD	4.05X	4.38GB
FujiFilm 2.4X DVD+RW Data CD	2.41X	4.38GB

The drive had no problem at all burning other 4X DVD+R media at 8X. Perhaps because the 8X DVD-R format is not officially standard, the 708A does not have the proper strategy logic to burn 8X DVD-R. As future BIOS upgrade to enable 8X DVD-R certainly seems feasible, it is obvious that no one will know until the DVD dash R forum gets their ducks in a row.

Full erase of a DVD+RW takes 24:23 minutes. A similar time was recorded for DVD-RW.