Plextor PX-B940SA 12x Blu-ray Disc Writer Review

1. Introduction2. Plextor PX-B940SA3. The Software4. Testing Methodology5. Performance: CD Testing6. Performance: DVD Testing7. Performance: BluRay Testing8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

The Plextor PX-B940SA arrives in a blue box with a picture of the product on the front and a list of specifications on the right.

The bundle includes a software disc, quick reference guide, warranty information, mounting screws and a Serial ATA cable. Our reviewers bundle was missing a SATA cable, so apparently some light fingered reviewer decided he needed a spare cable.

The Plextor drive is protected between two pieces of stryofoam.

Our drive features the 1.04 firmware revision which was updated a short while ago. Opti Drive Control shows that the PX-B940SA is an RPC-2 DVD drive. This means that the drives region information is stored in the firmware. The region can be changed five times and then it can't be changed again. The PX-P940SA won't let the end user set the book type of single layer DVD+R or DVD+RW media. The drive does however automatically set the book for DVD+R DL discs to ‘DVD-ROM' which helps with compatibility issues, particularly with older DVD players.

The drive might look familar to many people because it is based on Pioneer's BDR-205, a great drive. If you took away the Plextor and PX-B940SA logos, the drive would look identical to the Pioneer model.

The front of the drive is a clean design, and there is a single LED on the right next to the eject button. This LED lights up green when the drive is reading or writing data. This drive can back up titles protected by versions of SafeDisc previous to 2.51.

DVDINFOPro gives an overview of the drives reading and writing support. The Plextor drive can read and write to most BD and DVD formats.

Windows 7 automatically detects and installs drivers for the BluRay drive the first time it is connected. No problems at all with the setup on Windows 7 64 bit.

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