The Premium in the $110 (street) 52X/32X/52X Plextor PlexWriter Premium's name refers to the company's GigaRec technology, which burns smaller pits in the recordable media substrate than most other drives can. This lets the drive burn up to 1GB of data to regular CD-R (but not to CD-RW) discs. Many other CD and DVD-ROM drives will read these discs, but Plextor guarantees readability on its drives only. The feature works at only 4X, versus the 52X maximum speed when burning at the standard 650 to 700MB capacities.

We tested overburned discs in four DVD-ROM drives from Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, and Toshiba, and four CD-RW drives by Asus, Lite-On, Samsung, and TDK, all of which read the discs. We had poorer results with two DVD+RW recorders from Hewlett-Packard and Philips, however, which couldn't read any of the discs at all.

The included PlexTools software comes with a feature specific to Plextor drives called SecuRec, which lets you password protect a CD. You can download a free reader from the Plextor site (www.plextor.com/plextools) for systems with non-Plextor drives. Once a disc is password protected, it appears to be blank, albeit with zero bytes of available space—a clue that this is no ordinary disc. You need to run PlexTools and enter the password to make the disc readable. SecuRec works on CD-R media only.

Like the other internal drives, the PlexWriter Premium is an ATAPI internal drive with a master/slave jumper that defaults to the master, or primary, setting. Installation follows the usual routine of opening the case, plugging in the data, power, and audio cables (Plextor supplies only the ATA data cable), and setting the jumper, if necessary.

The package includes Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 for CD burning, and Plextor also ships its PlexTools software for burning discs, setting drive parameters, and managing the additional features of the drive, such as GigaRec and SecuRec. PlexTools puts an icon in the system tray for quick access. The software isn't as feature-rich as Roxio's, but it offers fast access to basic CD-burning features (including GigaRec) and disc–copying capabilities. PlexTools is relatively complete, lean, and easy to use. The only real complexity is figuring out which options to enable.

The PlexWriter Premium was the top performer on the CD Speed CD-R test, burning a file in 2 minutes 24 seconds using 52X media, although the CyberDrive CW099D and Samsung SM-352BRNS DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive were close behind at 2:31 and 2:32, respectively. At 3:29, the PlexWriter Premium outpaced all the others in the CD-RW burn test. The Asus CRW-5224A and CyberDrive CW099D essentially tied for second place at 3:36 and 3:37, respectively.

The PlexWriter Premium was the slowest unit, though, at digital audio extraction. Its 4,500 KBps may seem fast, but contrasting it with the 5,586KBps of the CyberDrive CDW099D and even the 4,964Kbps of the Asus CRW-5223A external drive makes clear that there are better solutions for extracting digital audio. In fact, even the 40X/12X/40X Plextor drive eked out a slightly higher DAE CD Speed score—4,527 KBps.

In the end, the PlexWriter Premium is a great CD burner at normal capacities. The GigaRec option is a nice plus, but the substantially slower record speed decreases the feature's usefulness. The real downside to the PlexWriter Premium is its cost, though. It's the priciest internal drive we tested.