HAHAHA...Plextor pulls a fast one!

[Jammrock]

For all you Plextor owners who have been wondering about Plextor's 'wonder back-up' utility, Res-Q, it has finally been released! What can it do, you might ask? Well, it allows you backup a hard drive to CD-R and if your computer crashes you can boot to the CD and restore your hard drive. Pretty nifty eh?

So how did Plextor pull a fast one? All Res-Q is, is Symantec/Norton Ghost with CD writing capabilities. Although it only costs $35, so it's not that bad.

Jammrock

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Athlon 650, Biostar board, 128 MB PC133 (Crucial), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, 10/100 NIC, lots of case fans, etc...

[xortam]

How does Res-Q compare with Adaptec's TakeTwo?

[iamtheone]

Jammrock

I'm looking into getting a burner. I know Plextor's latest burners are pretty sweet, but how about their older ones ie. PLEXTOR PXW-8432P1 8X4X32 IDE CD-RW .

Cheeper? Yes! As reliable is the question.

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Financial Freedom is only a click away!

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[Rags]

You pretty much can't go wrong with any of Plextor's or Yamahas drives, new or old.

Rags

[Jammrock]

I own a Plextor 8/4/32A and it works great. The Res-Q program works only with Plextor drives. In my experience, Plextor is #1, Yamaha is #2.

xortam,

I have never used either programs...kind of. I use Ghost all the time, but never is Res-Q. Ghost is a wonderful program, so Res-Q should be very good and easy to use.

Jammrock

[DentyCracker]

I have the same burner that Jamrock has. It rocks. 0 coasters burning Audio CDs using CDManager under BeOS 5 so far. Works well with EzCD Creator 4.02d as well. Going to sell it though to get the 12x10x32 Plextor (drool)

[EdSki]

Damn...now i want one too! There go the savings...

Thanks a lot u guys

Buying a nice plextor tommorow...8x4x32.

[EdSki]

I think dumping scsi would be a dumb move, it's the scsi drives that gave Plextor it's reputation.

Grtz,
Ed

[Rags]

SCSI cdrw's are the only way to go IMHO. After using an IDE then moving to SCSI, I don't see how I could ever go back.

Rags



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Partnership for an idiot free America

[LAMFDTK]

I have both the 8x and the 12x Plextor and I want to know what the big-ass deal is with the SKuzi vs. the IDE? I can burn a CD in great time on the IDE. Why spend the $$ and wait for the SCSI. I say get the IDE 12x and stop smoking POT for a while. !!!!

I love this product. I bought 4 of them for systems and they all crank! The CDRESQ is a buy vs Ghost . And its great when you Fuss up your O/S and you have a fully loaded image that you have not had the chance to screw up and bang, your back in biz. Forget Zips and Jazz drives that's what I have replaced with these units. What a great product. <**--End Commercial here--**>



[This message has been edited by LAMFDTK (edited 18 August 2000).]

[Wombat]

I ordered my Plextor 12/10/32A just the other day

SCSI is a nicer protocol, but I can't shell out the money for SCSI HD's right now, and I don't really need it. The biggest deal for me though is buying a SCSI card. I wouldn't go for a cheapie, but $300 for a performance difference I can't really realize? I might as well order the latest nVidia card every time they make a new one.....(couldn't resist).

[xortam]

I've long been a fan of SCSI devices. All of my PCs have been SCSI, including my first (Mac Classic). I can still use these devices easily on any of these systems. I like to place my shared SCSI devices into an external box which makes it easy to swap them between systems and saves room and heat generation in the main box. SCSI also frees up an interrupt vs. IDE. The other advantages of SCSI have become less of an issue with current IDE technology.

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• ASUS P2B-S, PIII 450MHz, Award ACPI BIOS v1010, 128 MB RAM
• MYLEX FlashPoint RAID+ (BIOS v2.02N) running RAID 0 on two 9 GB IBM DDRS 39130D Disks
• Diamond MX300 sound card, now with MX25 S/PDIF output
• Matrox Millennium G400 Max Dual Head - English
• NEC 5FG monitor
• Logitech MouseMan Wheel
• YAMAHA CRW4416S and NEC Multispin 3x CDs
• 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
• US Robotics 56K Voice FaxModem Pro
• Pioneer DVD-303S SCSI
• Note--All SCSI devices (except disk drives on RAID) are connected to onboard AIC7890 U2W SCSI
• Mainly running Win98 v4.10.1998

[paulcs]

I reviewed the new Plextor IDE drive, and as an old Plextor customer, I can recommend it without reservation. I focused almost exclusively on reliability, and LAMF and I tried hard to get it to screw up.

Plextor has incorporated Sanyo's "BURN-Proof" technology, a feature designed to minimize, if not elimate, buffer underrun errors. I found it to work better than Plextor's marketing literature claimed. (Honest! Have you ever heard of such a thing?)

I intentionally tested it on a VIA-based motherboard. No conflicts. No errors.

I recorded enormous amounts of data over a network, both large program files and tiny data files, without a single error.

Plextor claimed that thanks to BURN-Proof, you could now do simple operations like downloading email and surfing the Web while recording. After LAMF got his Plexwriter, I asked him to run SYSMark2000 while recording. Again, no errors. SYSMark2000 is a high end, content creation application benchmark, and the results of this test went far beyond Plextor's claims.

I used the perennially buggy Easy CD Creator throughout much of the testing. It monitors buffer activity, and I saw the buffer drop to 1%. BURN-Proof kicks in at or before this point, halts the recording process until the buffer collects enough data, finds the area of the disk where it left off, and starts the recording process again.

Sorry about the rant, but I really liked this drive. I have three Plextor SCSI drives, including an old 4/12 CDR. This is a great drive, and I hope Plextor can incorporate the BURN-Proof feature in their next SCSI drive.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Ghydda]

It is true that many of the advantages SCSI offered over EIDE has been minimized over time. However, one thing still surpasses EIDE by lightyears and that is the ability to have more than two devices on the same bus. This is the biggest obstacle for EIDE, the next biggest is the lack of cable length, command queing, and variaty of devices that can be attached to it.

I have got 5 hard drives, 1 CDROM, 1 Burner, 1 DVDROM and a DDS tapedrive. And only two cables connecting them to the host controller.
If I were using EIDE for this, I would need 5 different cables going to the onboard controller + 2 PCI EIDE controllers, eating up that last PCI slot, not to mention 4 IRQ's opposed to one IRQ.

THAT is why I prefer SCSI.

Ghydda

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2+2=5 - but only for extremly large values of 2.

[dZeus]

I own a Plextor 8/4/32A and it works great. The Res-Q program works only with Plextor drives. In my experience, Plextor is #1, Yamaha is #2.

what about Teac? in my opinion they are better than Yamaha drives.

oh, and manufacturers could do me a favour by dumping IDE completely, and removing support for IDE in the chipset, making it cheaper and saving IRQs.

HDD manufacturers could focus on creating cheap drives with SCSI interface (in stead of only making high performance SCSI drives and LOW + High performance IDE drives.

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 21 August 2000).]