The first thing to mention is of course is the drive’s 16X CD-R write speed, which is incredible. If the drive really was writing at 16X it would have a throughput of 2400 Kb/s, which will probably end up taxing your system heavily. Enter BURN-Proof technology which allows your CD Burner to recover from errors that would otherwise end up taxing your computer and forcing you to avoid touching anything in fear of making a coaster. This also allows the CD Burner to get away with using a tiny 2MB buffer. Also note that this drive does support overburning.

Another good point is the 40x CD Read speed which is finally fast enough to allow you to replace your stand alone CD-ROM drive with this burner alone. The 140ms random access time on this unit seems a bit high. I also like the FashROM in this unit which will allow you to easily download and flash updated firmware from Plextor’s website when they make revisions.