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Topic: 13 year old Plextor vs. today's HP and Dell drives (Read 13913 times) previous topic - next topic
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13 year old Plextor vs. today's HP and Dell drives

Reply #25
@cliveb:

Your argument doesn't hold if the initial failed rip from the cheap drive is also submitted along with other results to the AR database.

On the other hand, if only hard-to-rip disks are submitted for the "better" drive then that skews its results toward looking worse.

Personally I discount all such scenarios as being of dubious significance and take the database at face value, but assume large margins of error. I see it as just a general guideline and not an absolute measure of quality.

 

13 year old Plextor vs. today's HP and Dell drives

Reply #26
If everyone did as I do then the "better" drives wouldn't do as well.  This assumes they would have successfully ripped every CD that was was successfully ripped by the "lesser" drive, which is by no means a guarantee.  The point, however, is that people do different things.  David and pdq are right in pointing out that you really don't know which way the data may be skewed.

Back to my scenario, my "lesser" drive, which is an OEM, is quite capable of successfully ripping discs that my Plextor cannot.  It can also easily read DVDs burned by the Plextor which give the Plextor trouble, but that's another discussion. I have come to find that Sanyo-based Plextor drives aren't as great as people claim.  Again, they are good, but maybe only slightly better than the OEM drive that I use, which is a pretty good drive as well.

If those Matshita drives had very low numbers of users and submissions, I would probably discount their results. As for the Plextor PX-x30s, they have consistently ranked high ever since Spoon started compiling these lists. I think this is due to them being good drives, rather than because the submissions come from people exercising the exact same bias/behavior.

While the c't test is probably useful in deciding what drive to use to rip discs with the specific copy protection scheme tested, I don't think I'd rely on their test for ripping damaged discs because of the statistically insignificant sample size of test CDs (or is that just CD ). You're far better off looking at a more comprehensive data set, even if it isn't tightly controlled.  Owning two significantly different popular drives in the top-50 of the list generated from the AR database should get the job done.

13 year old Plextor vs. today's HP and Dell drives

Reply #27
The most thourugh tests of damaged Audio CD error correction I know of are made by CDRinfo.com. The higest tested drive is the a Plextor PX-B900A


13 year old Plextor vs. today's HP and Dell drives

Reply #29
Often these tests are done on CD-R discs (where the burning program will write specific c2 errors), CD-R discs perform very differently than pressed CDs.