Of the two drives, it's this one that's likely to find its way into desktop machines, particularly at home. This is because it uses the IDE interface, while the Mirai drive uses SCSI instead. The use of IDE/ATAPI means that this drive can easily be installed in the place of an existing IDE CD-R drive, or even a CD-ROM drive for that matter, with the minimum of fuss, configuration changes or jumper settings.

Once installed, all you need to do is set up the supplied WinOnCD authoring software and you're away. We found this software pretty good, although our personal preference would be for the Nero package supplied with the Mirai drive, simply because of its ease of use and specialist features.

With everything installed, we started the test process, and were immediately impressed by the durability of this new writing process. It was even possible to produce a perfect On-the-Fly copy of a CD at the full speed whilst running Scandisk on the hard drive - very impressive, and unheard of with older drives.

As you can tell from the name, the PlexWriter supports 12x write, 10x rewrite and 'up to 32x' read operations, so it's no slouch in any mode. Included in the box is one blank CD-R disk, one blank CD-RW disk, an audio cable and the software.

Company: Mirai

Contact: 0870 845 6666

Company: Plextor

Contact: +32 (2) 725 5522

Tags: plextor scsi parallel ata optical disc recording technologies cd-r cd-rw dvd hardware