Buy bye Plextor

[xortam]

Well we all know that Plextor recently announced that they're not producing any new SCSI burner models. I just found out that its more wide-spread than that. I went to return some items to a computer store this morning and I landed up talking to their tech and a customer that were discussing the Plextor PX-W1210S (I had purchased one recently). The tech mentioned that Plextor had decided to completely get out of the retail business and only sell to OEMs and such. I don't know how their sales are split along their various channels but I found this refocusing quite curious.

[Jammrock]

That's a shame, IF it's true...but kind of understood. It's well known fact that the big money is in OEM distribution. That's the reason why Matrox can effectively hold out on the cosumer market and performance 3D sectors (CAD and gaming) without significantly damaging profits. As long as they have landed some long term OEM deals they can do it and still make a bundle. By dropping the consumer end they can drastically reduce costs on tech support (OEM's provide tech support for all parts in OEM computers, not the part manufacture) and can concentrate their manufacturing on producing low cost, high quality CD-RW's for the big guys.

On a secondary note, Plextor doesn't have the brand recognition outside the more technical savy groups than HP and IOMega have. Thus consumer sales probably aren't as popular as they would like.

Hopefully this ends up being just a rumor and nothing more. Especially since they just announced this cool USB unit:

http://www.plextor.com/english/products/8_8_24u.html

Jammrock

[xortam]

This tech stated that he had first hand knowledge of this decision. He said most of their burner sales are to the big burning houses who buy the towers and the consumer sales were relatively small.

On a side note, he also mentioned that Sony makes the drives for HP (or perhaps it was simply the tray mechanisms). Also, what's up with the double density Sony drives? I just saw these in the last week. Its apparently a proprietary technology. I haven't done any searching on this yet and I'd be interested to hear if any of you have much knowledge about this.

[cbman]

There was an article about it in one of the Maximum PC Magazines that my brother likes to get... it was an interesting read...

More than likely someone else will be able to tell you more about the technology before I can dig up that article to get the just of it.

From what I remember there are a few different technologies of that style emerging...

I would rather not lead you astray though so I will try to find the magazine first before I post about it.

[KvHagedorn]

And what harm would it do them to sell to the end user? This sort of arrogance is totally out of hand. We are customers. What difference does it make that we are not buying 100,000 pieces of one product? If this is their standard, by the same token you can be driven out of business suddenly when one of your 3 or 4 customers bails on you. Narrowing one's customer base out of pure stupid arrogance is very bad business. I predict the end of this company if they do this. They still don't have DVD drives, anyhow. That should tell you how smart their management is.. =\

I have always loved the quality of Plextor drives. I wish they had someone at the company who could handle the business end as well as they handle the product quality (for what products they make) .

[xortam]

Re: double density

FYI.

The article is over a year old but it has a lot of good info on DDCD.

[xortam]

Looks like Yamaha is moving ahead ...

Yamaha Japan announces CRW3200 series!

The PR hasn't been translated to English yet apparently.
The AudioMaster can write CD-Rs at up to 24x. CDR-Info states that the unit will have IDE and FireWire interfaces, but "Yamaha also dropped the SCSI interface completly."

[dZeus]

Plextor and Yamaha from the SCSI supporters list... arg

so Teac remains.... and who else?

[xortam]

HP, Sony, ...

[xortam]

Hmmmm ... Plextor has started a rebate program. That helps reinforce the rumours.

[DosFreak]

This doesn't help in my plans to go full SCSI.

[agallag]

I used to think scsi was the only way to go, but it's really not that big of a deal anymore. There's really no advantage to SCSI anymore in any installation that you'd have at home. With Burn-Proof technologies, buffer underruns don't matter.

SCSI is still a good choice for large RAID arrays, but for CD, there's no advantage. Even in most new servers (Compaq ProLiants for example), the CD-ROM drives are IDE.

Of course, now that fibre channel is picking up steam, SCSI is seriously in trouble in every market...

[Gurm]

Yeah, it's rather silly nowadays.

I mean, even NICE workstation drives only deliver ~25MB/sec. sustained, which is well within the limitations for even U33, nevermind U66 or U100.

Ultra160 SCSI is a wonderful thing - if you have an 8-drive chain going. In servers, certainly. In workstations... it's going the way of the dodo.

- Gurm