peklop wrote:

Perfect detailed reviews, like this legendary Yamaha CRW-F1 and Plextor Premium

Two of my favorite drives! 😀 Though that Yamaha had serious QA issues. I bought one with a broken tray suspension straight from the factory. Yamaha's customer service was useless, and I only ended up with a working drive after one just happened to show up on the shelf at Best Buy, years after it was discontinued.

Anyway, cool link. I didn't know about this at the time, and am on the hunt for a black-bezel early DVD drive. I would love to have another PlexCombo DVD / CD-RW, or just a good 1- or 2x DVD-ROM or DVD-RAM. Been wondering if there's a list of early models anywhere that I can use to create search filters.

Cool links, thanks for posting.

I love my plextor's, all of them.

I have a Yamaha CRW-F1, but I cannot figure out what is special about it, it has no unique read command like the plextors have and cannot read CDS or LaserLock like lite-on or optiarc drives can.

Well.. for one, it had some burn modes that let you write more fault-tolerant discs. This is back when people still cared about writable media longevity, and compatibility with CD players that weren't specifically intended to use CD-Rs. I was positively sure that some day I would have my own studio, and thus would absolutely need to be able to write the highest quality audio CD masters. Thus, it was essential that I have one of those drives, as well as an array of Plextors.

Then there's Disc T@2, which is a neat party trick. Also a nifty blue and purple LED. (From an era where people were sick of yellow and green, and not yet sick of blue.)

Other than that, it was just a very nice, high-quality drive, with enthusiasm only dampened due to a tendency for mechanical failures out-of-the-box. If you got a good one, it would be a top-shelf drive though.

fascinating, I always assumed it was a sister site of Polish https://www.cdrinfo.pl/, but PL one is still going and comparing them now, they were fully independent.

What is Disc T@2 ?

Yeah I'm not really interested in writing abilities, only reading for archival of my games and audio CDs before the rot takes them all.

It's kind of like LightScribe, except rather than drawing laser-etched images on a specially-coated label side, they could etch images into the unused portion of the data side. Obviously you only got to use it if you didn't fill the disc completely, but I could see it being handy for copyright text or contact info. Mostly a gimmick, but a cool one.

I use my Plextor Premium for archiving audio CDs (calibrated sector start and all that, plus it's just generally a good drive). I use whatever's handy for data discs. 😀 I've been putting lots of miles on a tiny Pioneer USB BD-RW drive just because it's so convenient.