Plextor Blu-ray Disc Combo PX-B320SA
The Plextor Blu-ray Disc Combo Drive is an affordable Blu-ray optical drive that plays Blu-ray discs as well as reads and writes DVD’s and CD’s with a great set of features and extras.
Ease of Use, Performance: 20/25
Look & Feel: 20/25
Features 23/25
How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 88/100
Strictly from a price standpoint you cannot do better in the Plextor Blu-ray PX-320SA that can take the place of a regular DVD CD optical drive in your computer. Replacing the optical drive features of a regular SATA DVD and CD reader and writer with a Blu-ray drive also adds the Blu-ray player functionality for a great step up in your entertainment.
The Plextor PX-320SA is a SATA 8X Blu-ray drive that also reads DVD’s at 16x and CD’s at 48x speeds as well as writes to DVD’s and CD’s at those speeds depending on disc type. The features of an optical drive need to at least stand out in the market today as a common SATA optical drive can be purchased for under $50 and this one does not only for its Blu-ray capabilities.
I purchased two optical drives almost a year ago on sale for $50 for both at Newegg and got some decent but not outstanding drives so the common DVD/CD optical drive is quite inexpensive. Blu-ray reading optical drives are also coming down in price and are affordable enough to make a Blu-ray optical drive an option as your main DVD/CD drive in your computer.
Using this drive as a regular optical drive adds the Blu-ray playing capability as well as the great DVD and CD read and write features and this combination also includes some great features. The package from Plextor comes with the PX-320SA drive, some mounting screws, a SATA cable and two discs with the Cyberlink BD Suite and PlexUtilities.
The Cyberlink BD Suite is a great addition to this complete package and really adds a lot of functionality to any optical drive and computer system. I do have to warn you though; the Cyberlink PowerDVD player that plays both DVD movies and Blu-ray movies is an OEM version that only plays stereo audio.
The Cyberlink software that comes with the Plextor drive has a full suite of optical disc software programs including copy, backup and movies player capabilities but it is an OEM or packaged version. This version plays audio in stereo and not in surround sound so if you’re looking for the full Blu-ray experience with this optical drive you’re also going to need to spend some money on some software.
I have received full versions of the Cyberlink PowerDVD9 as well as ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre 3 and will be publishing reviews on those soon. The Cyberlink PowerDVD is great for viewing regular and high definition movies but for the full surround sound experience you do need to upgrade this or purchase some other full version that includes surround sound support.
The other software included in the Plextor drive is called PlexUtilities that is a small suite of test and general optical programs that are useful for information about your drive and discs you may use. PlexUtilities includes an erase program but for the most part the utilities included will probably not be used very often or on a day to day basis for the average computer user.
The Plextor drive itself is a great optical drive that lives up to its features and specifications with read speeds and write speeds very close to the maximum that Plextor brags about. In testing I used a third party software instead of the included PlexUtilities to keep a fair and honest benchmark with Nero DiscSpeed to measure the transfer rates and access times.
I was receiving just under maximum read and write speeds with CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs with averages for CD write speeds at 37.25x for my tests. DVD write speeds were 12.02x for the average and Blu-ray read speeds were 5.43x for average while my tests on an Optiarc DVD RW AD-7190S optical drive were slightly lower in the same system.
I was getting 35.96x write speeds for CD, 11.99x write speeds for DVD discs on the Optiarc drive with my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ PC running at 2.99 GHZ with a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 motherboard running Windows Vista Business 32 bit. The drives are setup on the system using regular SATA connections directly to the motherboard and installation of the Plextor drive was as simple as any other optical drive with only the two connections.
The Plextor drive does read and write to the featured specifications and also has access times close to the ones posted on the Plextor site. I was getting random access times of 146ms with full access times of 269ms which are pretty close to the 350ms times stated.
While my tests may not be optimized they are typical of a working computer and are ones you could expect to see on a system that is pretty good and not top of the line. My test computer is also my working computer and has a typical setup for average gaming and computer use so I feel is fairly typical of the average home user as well.
My tests show that the Plextor PX-B320SA drive is a really good Blu-ray drive that also does a great job of reading and writing DVD and CD media. The Plextor drive comes with the usual programs to not only copy and burn optical discs but to play Blu-ray movies for high definition entertainment.
As a side note to using DVD and CD media you should watch when you purchase these as some discs may not read or write to the full speeds of your drive. Watch out for read and write speeds, usually marked as a number with a “x” or “X” which denotes speeds of read or write times.
In testing I used an HP CD-R disc capable of 52x speeds but the speed of your drive is the top speed you would be able to read or write. I also used a Ridata 16x DVD+R for DVD speeds and a regular Blu-ray movie to test read speeds for the Blu-ray testing.
The Cyberlink BD Suite may be an OEM version that does not have surround sound 5.1 or 7.1 support but it does a great job of playing those high definition Blu-ray movies. The PlexUtilities does add some other useful programs from erasing and ensuring data is completely gone from optical discs but is not much for the casual computer user.
The Plextor Blu-ray Drive PX-B320SA is a great and affordable Blu-ray player and DVD CD drive that is available at several online and local stores for about $135. The Plextor drive does a great job of playing Blu-ray movies as well as your day to day optical drive functions for a great overall main optical drive for your computer.
I highly recommend the Plextor PX-B320SA Blu-ray Disc Combo Drive for a great multi disc drive that performs well and is well worth the cost.