Plextor PX-810SA DVD Writer Review

Although Blu-ray drives are the flavor of the season but their adoption has been slow due to high costs. This has forced consumers to look out for DVD burners for now and wait till prices of Blu-ray drives drop to reasonable levels. SATA drives have taken over their IDE counterparts for better bandwidth. Plextor makes great burners and hopefully PX-810SA is no exception.

Plextor PX-810SA DVD Writer specifications :

• Dimensions : 5.7″ x 7.1″ x 1.6″
• Type : DVD/RW, DVD-RAM
• Read speed : 40x(CD), 16x(DVD)
• Write speed : 40x(CD), 18x(DVD-R), 10x(DVD-R DL)
• Buffer size : 2MB
• Buffer underrun protection : BURN-Proof
• Approx. price : $80

The Plextor PX-180SA DVD Writer are known for their quality and this one is no exception and has good build quality. The drive comes with a SATA connector, an upgrade over IDE connectors which were used in older drives. This allows the drive to use higher bandwidth which translates to greater data throughput.

The drive comes bundled with Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, MyDVD Video Authoring, CinePlayer DVD-Video Playback, BackUP MyPC Archive and backup softwares. That is a great software bundle, rarely seen with any DVD burners.

The drive supports almost all CD/DVD formats for both reading and writing apart from the HD formats. The drive unfortunately is not region free and hence you are bound to face problem while viewing movies from a different region. The region can only be changes upto a maximum of five times. Another downside with the drive is the inability to set read speed, although most of you won’t even bother to do that.

The performance of the drive is good but leaves room for improvement. The time taken by the drive to burn a dual layer disc was around 21.5 minutes. The time to rip a dual layer DVD was exactly half of that. Burning a single layer DVD took around 8 minutes which is on the slower side. Ripping a CD took close to 2.5 minutes. Hence it does not offer top class performance but good enough for daily use.

Pros :

• Great software bundle
• Good performer
• SATA compatible

Cons :

• Not region free
• Fixed read speed
• Slightly expensive

Final Thoughts

The Plextor PX-810SA DVD Writer is a reliable and a decent performing DVD writer. The great software bundle also adds to the cost of the burner. This is a good DVD burner to invest in if you are looking for reliability and good performance.

My Rating : 3.25/5