Not only does it write and rewrite at the fastest speeds on the market; the PlexWriter Premium also features a well-above-average 8MB buffer and the ability to squeeze more than a gig of data onto a 700MB CD-R. And it sells for, if not a bargain price, a price that's quite worth it if you've wanted to be able to do all the things this PlexWriter can do.

But it's not all cotton candy--those 1GB discs can be burned only at 8X. That's still a decent speed, but it feels sloth-like after you've been hammering discs out at 52X. And they can't be read in a lot of other drives, so you can't use them for disseminating data to other users with non-Plextor drives.

But these are minor beefs for such a powerful drive. The 32X rewrite speed alone makes the sticker price of this PlexWriter worth it for users who spend a lot of time with CD-RW backups. And the 8MB buffer and the built-in underrun protections mean that you won't be creating a lot of bad discs, even at high speeds, with this drive.

Plextor includes Roxio's Easy CD Creator for disc burning and Direct CD for packet writing. They've also included the professional version of their PlexTools, which lets users customize all the advanced settings of the drive for optimized performance. And there's a trial version of Dantz Retrospect, a useful program that lets you schedule automatic backups; the trial version is good for only 30 days.

Installing the drive proved typical--it took just a few minutes to replace our current drive with the PlexWriter. Plextor's manual walked us through the installation process in detail. The front of the drive includes a headphone jack and volume control for listening to audio CDs, and Plextor even tossed in a handy eject tool so you don't have to bend a paperclip out of sorts to pop out a CD when there's no power to the drive.

You can find CD-RW drives for less, but you won't find any that do more than the Plextor PlexWriter Premium.

Pro: Fastest speeds out there, loads of features.

Con: High-end features have their limitations.