Plextor PX-708UF2 - DVDRW drive - Hi-Speed USB/IEEE 1394 (FireWire) ( PX-708UF2/SW )

Rating:
Summary: Big, bulky, klunky, works
Review: First of all, a word of warning: I have not used this product under either Windows or MacOS. I have only used it under Mandrake 10.1 Linux and Fedora Core 3 Linux using the bundled K3B burner software that comes with the KDE desktop. Thus I am only reviewing the hardware component of the product, not the software that comes bundled it.

Okay, first of all, this thing uses a desktop-type mechanism. So it is big and bulky. For that matter, it is even bigger and bulkier than necessary to fit a desktop-type mechanism into the case. Do not buy this if you want a portable burner to slip into your laptop case, buy one built around a laptop-type mechanism instead (Sony has one, it's almost twice the price but so it goes).

The next thing to note is that this comes with a laptop-type Firewire cable (has the teensy little connector at the computer end), not a desktop-type Firewire cable. If you want to plug it into a desktop via Firewire, you'll need to buy a desktop-type Firewire cable. Or you can use USB2, if your computer has USB2. Unfortunately, on most desktops if they even have USB2 only one or two of the ports are USB2, and it's not clearly marked which ones they are. Like all external drive products, this runs super-slow under USB1, so that is to be avoided. Thus why I prefer to run Firewire.

The final bit of clunkiness is that it comes with a switch on the back to switch between USB and Firewire, rather than automatically detecting it like most modern products. The switch comes in the USB position. Thus much confusion on my part when, for the first time, I plugged it in via Firewire, waited for it to appear in /proc/scsi/scsi, and.... nothing happened. Flipping the switch to the Firewire position then turning the drive off then on fixed that.

Once that was all sorted out, I was able to write a Fedora-3 DVD on my Mandrake 10.1 laptop onto a DVD+RW (K3B reported about 1.8x write speed or about 400K/sec, but this may have been a limitation of my laptop's hard drive or of the K3B software rather than of the Plextor writer), carry the drive over to my server, boot into the Fedora-3 installer via the built-in CDROM drive (the installer image is on the DVD), which then found the Plextor with the Fedora-3 DVD in it and used to install Fedora-3 on my server without the need for all that $#%@ CD-ROM swapping that normally is needed. The install was quite fast, taking about 30 minutes to install all the software on the DVD, which is as fast as I've done it doing installs off of an internal DVD-ROM or over a gigabit network off of a fast RAID5 server with 24 drives. So I have to say that it does what it's supposed to do, and does it with Linux too, and that the limit on read speed is more likely to be how fast your computer can process the data rather than the drive mechanism or the Firewire (I have not used the USB2 so have no comment there).

Gets only 4 stars because of the unnecessary clunkiness. Otherwise, it works great.