Portable USB 2 CD-RW Drive

The PlexWriter PX-S88TU CD-RW drive weighs only 0.5 kg and supports the latest USB 2 interface, which is similar to USB 1.1, only much faster. This interface supports speeds up to 480 Mbps and is backward compatible with USB 1.1. With a USB 2 interface, the drive supports 8x write/rewrite and 24x read speeds. With USB 1.1 however, its performance is limited to 4x write/rewrite and 6x read speeds. Most motherboards these days come with USB 2 support, but if you have a make that is older than April 2000, then you won't be able to use the drive's maximum capabilities. 

The drive has an attractive silver casing and its lightweight design and USB support also make it extremely portable. It supports burn-proof technology and comes bundled with Nero 5.5,
InCD, and NeoMedia player. It also includes a CD-R and CD-RW disk. 

To test the drive's performance, we first burnt 648 MB of data from the hard drive to a CD-R at 8x write speed. The drive did this in 13 min 48 sec, which is good for a portable drive. Next we measured the time it takes to create and burn an ISO image from the hard disk to a CD-R disk. Here the drive took 1 min 27 sec to create the image and 13 min to burn it on to the CD-R, which is again pretty quick. 

The drive can work up to 8x on CD-RW media, provided the media itself supports this speed. Unfortunately, we were not able to find 8x media in the market, so had to resort to 4x media for the tests. We measured the time to do a full-format-physical as well as logical formatting-using the bundled InCD software. The drive took 21 min 11 sec for the physical format and 14 min 35 Sec for the logical one, which is a bit long. This might change if you use 8x media. After a RW disk is formatted it can be used as a floppy disk. So next we measured how long it takes to copy a single 98.8 MB compressed file to the
CD-RW disk, in which the drive took 3 min 7 sec, thereby giving it an average write speed of 0.52 MB/sec. In the reverse process of copying everything from the
CD-RW to the HDD, the drive took just 2 min 23 sec, giving it an average read speed of 0.7 MB/Sec, which is again pretty quick. 

The bottom line: The drive is a good choice if you need such a portable solution. For the desktop, cheaper and faster IDE solutions are available. 

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs