It all started when my old Plextor PX-712 SA burned DVDs that a friend of mine was unable to read. Several months later, it would not even read plain DVDs anymore (normal pressed DVDs). It was still good for CD ripping, so whenever I wanted to watch a movie, I just ripped it on my other computer, moved the ripped files to a network share and watched it via ethernet.
Wednesday, I decided to restore my drive image because my Vista installation is acting strange. I burned my imaging boot CD to an old CD-R and tried to boot from it. It failed, again and again.
The Plextor drive was really good, but with only 2 years in service, its life expectancy seems quite low. Today, I replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-215D in the hope that Pioneer’s drives might be better (I chose the exact model referencing the AccurateRip Drive Database to find one that would be able to do perfect CD audio rips just like my Plextor drive.
- I cannot set the ripping speed to anything else than 40.0x. Although I know that it’s supposed to be a myth that drives work more accurate at lower speeds, at least for the Plextor drive, that myth held true.
- The drive’s C2 error detection seems to work well. All my CDs are as good as new (since I never use them, I rip them once and put them away), so this may be a moot point.
- Enabling EAC’s “overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out” seems to be a very bad idea for this drive. Whenever I enable that option, I get sync errors and suspicious sectors for the final track of a CD. Changing virtually any setting leads to a different checksum.
- The EAC offset test CD calculates a read offset of +8 (tested 5 times, always the same), but the AccurateRip Drive Database indicates that the read offset is +48. I’m baffled as to what’s going on here.
All in all, the drive seems to be capable of doing accurate CD audio rips and, although I’m wishing that I had bought a Plextor drive again, I think I’ll keep it.
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