Customer Reviews

Plextor PX-716UF - DVDRW (dual layer) drive - Hi-Speed USB/IEEE 1394 (FireWire) ( PX-716UF/SW )

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been using this drive for about three months and I love it to pieces. I run it all day, every day, and it has never had the slightest hiccup. I've used it with +R, -R, and DL media and have never burnt a coaster; not once. The firmware upgrade gives me 6x write speed on 4x DL media with no discernable loss of quality.

I connect via Firewire and get blazing data transfer speeds. I use it with Norton Ghost with no problems for perfect Ghost Image system backups; I use Nero for just about everything else.

HERE IS THE REASON WHY IT WORKS FOR ME: I've been aware of Roxio for close to ten years now, and have tried their software products on several occasions. I must hand it to Roxio for their consistency.....for ten years or more, they have produced among the worst, most bloated, most obtuse and most buggy software I have ever encountered. In ten years they appear to have learned absolutely nothing, as evidenced by the poor souls who have posted negative reviews and comments here after installing Roxio's inherently flawed software. I find it utterly incomprehensible that Plextor has chosen to partner with Roxio, as it is much like Mercedes partnering with Yugo. WHY?

Plextor, do you have a death wish? Do you find marketplace success somehow unappealing and prefer humiliation and failure? Why do you do this to your customers?

Similarly, I've been aware of Memorex for well over thirty years and have been similarly impressed with them. If you want your audio tape to jam in your machine, to instantly foul your tape heads, to break or to produce lousy sound, choose Memorex audio tape. For this reason, I've never even tried their computer media as I have had such consistently bad experiences with their audio and video tape products.

My heart goes out to the folks who have posted negative reviews and comments here, as I would be doing the exact same thing if I had installed all of the software that Plextor supplies and had used bad recording media. I can think of no surer route to a messed up computer than by installing Roxio software and using Memorex media (Verbatim has always worked well for me, as has Maxell and Sony).

I did install the included Plextools software, and find it to be stable and problem-free, but I haven't had the need to use it much, as Nero satisfies most of my disc-burning software needs with stability, user-friendliness and efficiency.

The great disadvantage here is that if you don't already have the Nero software on your machine, the price of this drive has just increased by eighty dollars if you decide to buy the current incarnation of Nero's Ultra Edition. Try the included Plextools software first if you don't already have Nero, it may do the trick for you.

Nero may not be the only solution; other burning packages may work well also, but above all DON'T INSTALL THE INCLUDED ROXIO SOFTWARE.

I urge potential buyers to read through the previous reviews, as I agree on most points that those users bring forth.

I buy a plextor about every other model. This one is a GRRRREAT replacement for my Toshiba laptop el-crapo-burner.

The great ease and power of plextor in a nice portable format. Use it on your laptop, take it with you to back up other computers. Plays well with Ghost.

If we wanted to have perfect DVD copies of movies then the Sony DRX-700UL Double Layer FireWire/USB 2.0 External DVD±RW Drive was the only real dual-layer until now. That Sony drive allowed you to perfectly copy what is called DVD9. DVD9 is what Hollywood uses to make those discs. In the burning world we have DVD-R + R media called DVD5. DVD 5 is around the half the size of a DVD9. This means that when you backup your movies to DVD-R, you need to compress with programs like DVDshrink in conjunction with Nero Burning Rom. Most films can be compressed or DVDs stripped to produce 80% to 100% quality viewing. However on some films they are so big and fast that sometimes the compression can be down as low as 60%. Now 60% compression with DVD Mpeg is not bad but 80% is quite acceptable and 99% of films work great on standard DVD-R. So burning with this hardware is no problem - quality movies is the end result, but if you want pure 100% quality, then be prepared to pay for it with Double Layer technology and the PX-716 does just that. Check out the Double Layer DVD Discs. Haha - as you can see the Discs are the catch because they cost a bomb - but anyway you have a right to know that this technology exists and also that it is easier to use (Direct copy; no compression). So DVD5 or DVD9. Both options are here.

Nero Burning Rom comes bundled with this package nd is 99.9% effective but has a tendency to corrupt now again simply because it has a vast configuration system. Nero is a core burning tool. This means that several backup packages out there will actually find Nero on install and use it for burning. One example is DVDshrink that runs Nero in the background while backing up DVD movies on DVD-R. I/O errors with these programs, including DVD Decrypter, are usually the result of a configuration problem with Nero. One example is updating your Plextor firmware. Sometimes this requires you to reinstall Nero. This problem however is the only bug I have found with Nero. Just on the side - I highly recommend Imation, Memorex or Verbatim as relatively cheap good second class media (80% or higher burn success rate). DVD is still in its early days of development and some media is garbage so don't blame Nero or the Plextor if you make coasters (half burned DVD-R Discs that are useless to you) with this software. I also recommend a healthy supply of at least 3 DVD-RW Discs for TESTING your burning so that you NEVER make a coaster and waste money. Okay, now back to Nero. Nero is the most configurable burning tool out there while Nero Express is for those who do not know a thing about burning and works like a Wizard. A word of advice is to stick with the Rom and learn it without using the Wizard. You can choose from burning 12 CD formats and 6 DVD formats, including several variations of each format. There is not a Disc format you can not Burn with this program. The Plextor burners have great hardware based error correction systems and in conjunction with the Nero software make a perfect burn almost every time. Nero also happens to be extremely fast, if not the fastest out there, however fast is also in terms of how fast your burner is, but the software package requires little to no processing before a 8GB DVD is being pulled onto your HD. You can create ISOs with Nero and even use Nero to open up ISOs so you can read the content. There is an amazing amount of free software out there that uses this burner as their base and rightly so. It is the best burning software out there at this time of writing. Also the hardware comes bundled with Pinnacle Systems Media Studio 8 (a full DVD authoring program).

Now to the hardware itself. A USB2 connection at the back means top seed copying to and from the HD. There is a firewire connection if you want to use it and also audio out with volume control. What makes this DVD+-R X 8 (with RW and CD burning capability) speed burner so good is that it is light and yet built like a rock. You can take this anywhere with you although it is about 3/5th smaller than a PS2 so a nice little backpack is ideal for transport. Its error correcting is by far the best out there and I have burned maybe 800+ DVDs without any problems with it today except for bad media.

Pros:

- Take it anywhere.

- Best DVD5 DVD9 burner out there.

- Not very noisy.

- Nice software bundle.

Cons:

- Price.

- Bit big.

If your first concern is quality then plextor is for you. If you're time is worth nothing, and you like the hair pulling experience of compensating for a poorly engineering product then plextor is not for you.

Plextor's new AutoStrategy technology, allows perfect writes -- now more than ever. Verily Plextor can write ANYTHING ROUND. One may buy the cheapest media say $0.19 DVD-R and simply "sacrafice" four discs and the plextor (sanyo base) hardware in concert with the plextor (taiyo yuden assist) firmware will develop it's own customized write strategy to assure one receives FLAWLESS BURNS that not only play fine in plextor but in other playback devices!

The bundled PlexTools has most of the features one could want with any burner software. Its audio extraction mode FAR SURPASSES boring old EAC. For a few more dollars the PlexTools XL edition gives serious tweaking power to geeks.

If you can honestly claim zero coasters you are probably using a Plextor!

I like the drive. I upgraded from a 708UF. However the Roxio Software that ships with the drive is very unstable. As a matter of fact it installs a packet writer driver that will tear up your system. You can not uninstall this software unless you uninstall all the included software.

The only way I can keep my computer from constantly rebooting is to turn off the 716UF.

Plextor has been no help. The only comment they had was to take the drive back for a refund.

Im currently using the software that came with my 708 drive and if I had the chance I would return the 716uf drive but my daugter managed to grab my 708 drive so Im stuck.

I bought this multi-format drive in order to burn home movies to DVD and back up data from the 'puter. Simply put, it rocks. It will burn any available format and is easy and simple to set up. Plus, it's good looking and, when mounted vertically, takes up very little desk space.

For those of you looking into copying video,as I was, the kind of burner you get is only half the story. I had to upgrade my computer from 256k of RAM to 1Gb...yes, that's 1 Gig, of RAM. Otherwise, the rendering would take forever and you couldn't run any other processes during the copying. The software choices you make are also critical. The plextor ships with Roxio which seems to work pretty well, but I'm in the process of switching over to 1Click dvd copy which seems to work better for video.

Got it two weeks ago from bestbuy.com for an amazing $171.00. The drive itself was manufactured Feb 2005.

The drive is amazing. No coasters yet, I have been burning DVD+Rs, DVD+RWs and one DVD+R at 16x, and have had no problems at all. I will try a DVD+R DL soon, thanks to amazon.com's Verbatim DL DVD+R sale ($21.99-$8 rebate for 3).

The utilities and software that come with it are the best.

Highly recommended.

My first PX-716UF quit after six months.

$20 to ship it to them and they send me another.

The 2nd PX-716UF quit after four months and 30 burns.

Plextor refused to replace the 2nd unit, since they only

cover the replacement for 3 months.

Don't waste your money on their defective products.

I purchased this drive in order to use the dl function to use fewer disks for backups. Any other uses would have been gravy. I purchased Plextor for 2 reasons: A) I had owned a satisfactory Plextor DVD drive about 15 years ago; and B) A user reported that it would record "on anything round",although I did doubt that was literally true.

The first thing I found out was that there are only a limited number of dvd media approved bt Plextor. I found that out when I put a Memorex blank in the drive, and the screen said, "INCOMPATIBLE MEDIA". Then I found out that although Plextor included Retrospect back up software, the software was not configured for the device. However, Retrospect said it could be "custom configured" for the device, and I then followed on screen instructions to do that. The first thing that happened was that it used an expensive dl disk to do it, and then locked the disk. Then I confidently started a full backup of my hard drives. Not to drag this out, it then wasted 5 more dl media, putting only 1.9gig-2.0gig on each disk.

When I realized what had happened, I called Plextor tech support and was told that I should purchase the upgrade version of Roxio's Easy Media Creator, v. 7.5 which contains a copy of Back Up My PC and that program would make effective use of the dl media. When I received and installed the program, (which incidentally wipes out the limited bundled version of 7.0) I found that that EMC provides for only 4.7 gig media, and that BUM PC says NOTHING about what kind of media it can use, and I wasn't willing to probably waste more dl media. I called tech support once more. This time the tech I spoke with said he couldn't find any notes about my previous conversation. (Would you want to bet that the first tech didn't do his job properly?) He also advised me to reinstall the original, bundled, OLDER version of EMC.

My advice is simple: Avoid this drive as you would the plague. I wish I had.

At this point, I can not even find backup software that says it can use dl media, let alone that it is configured with this particular device

In short this drive is great when it actually works. I spent almost $80 trying to find cdr and dvd media that this drive would recognize. The most puzzling thing by far is that after burning many CDRs of a certain brand the drive would stop recognizing the brand of cdr for no apparent reason. It would work again later. So when the moons are aligned it worked. Plextor replaced my first one but the it started up again. Just a big hassle.

So I won't be buying a Plextor drive again.