Plextor 24/10/40U (USB 2.0)

There are plenty of external CD writers on the market, but few are as solid as the new Plexwriter 24/10/40U. If build quality was our only consideration, we'd give Plextor five stars immediately for its metal casing with thick, rubber shock protectors at both ends of the drive.

At 2.1kg this makes it very heavy, so it's not ideal if portability is an issue. It's a bit of a letdown to find an external power brick in the box, especially when the drive is already so heavy.

Inside the case is a standard Plextor CD writer, with a 4Mb buffer, capable of writing CDs at 24-speed, CD-RWs at 10-speed and reading CDs at 40-speed. This is the fastest external CD writer we've seen, and it's all thanks to the USB 2.0 interface. External USB 1.0 writers are restricted to a four-speed write.

As with all recent Plextor drives, this one supports Burnproof, which prevents buffer underruns, and Powerec II, which examines the quality of the blank disc and sets the write speed accordingly.

Software consists of a copy of Nero 5.5, plus In-CD for packet writing and a manual, together with Plextor's own Plextools and drivers.

The Plexwriter is blisteringly fast, outperforming its internal sibling in all but one of our tests. It only took three minutes and 17 seconds to copy a software CD, compared to four minutes 44 seconds on the internal drive. To complete a full format on a CD-RW disc took an impressive 12 minutes and five seconds.

With USB 2.0 cards now around the £50 mark, this is a great drive for those with no free expansion bays. Just be careful not to drop it on your foot.

Contact: Dabs 0870 429 3120
www.plextor.be