back to article Plextor PX-L611U portable DVD writer

As Blu-Ray climbs to the top of the optical storage ladder, one might assume that manufacturers of optical drives would cease production of anything that doesn’t feature this technology. However, Plextor has seen fit to launch the PX-L611U, a smart external DVD writer. Plextor PX-L611U Etching ahead: Plextor's PX-L611U …

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  1. James Foreman

    Regioned?

    If I plug this in to my Mac, will it do things with the firmware and make this stick to one region, or can I use it to play DVDs regardless of region?

  2. Richard Jukes

    Plextor still rock

    Its nice to see Plextor still making CD drives, its what they were very good at back in the day. I use a CD drive possibly once a year now, and thats to install OS media. CD's are dead, hell even DVD's are on their way out. Long live the USB HDD!

  3. BristolBachelor Gold badge

    Portable Blu-ray writers please

    How about a review / round-up of portable Blu-ray recorders? Minimum DL, BDXL if possible.

    DVD is fine as a media for recording a few things, but when you need sooooo many of the bleeders to archive stuff that the index of disks is so big it needs it's own disk...

    If nobody has happened to send on into you, go around and ask for them. (pretty please).

    (Oh and any commentards that say backup to external HDD instead, can I just say that the virus that trashed my wife's laptop yesterday also trashed the external HDD and she's lost almost a weeks photos as a consequence.)

    1. Brian 6
      Stop

      @BristolBachelor

      "(Oh and any commentards that say backup to external HDD instead, can I just say that the virus that trashed my wife's laptop yesterday also trashed the external HDD and she's lost almost a weeks photos as a consequence.".............A virus that infected her JPG's ??? U having laugh a mate ?? Would be the easiest thing in the world to recover her pictures.

  4. Danny 14

    indeed

    it would be nice if these manufacturers of external devices could tack on a USB storage device too. That way you could put portable burning apps on the flash part and have the drive too. Saves carrying two things around (plus netbooks with USB ports dont tend to have many.

  5. jason 7
    Stop

    @BristolBach

    Its pretty rare a virus trashes a PC as it stops it passing on. The best thing to do is to remove the HDDs and scan them using another PC with MSSE/Malwarebytes.

    Also make sure the scanning PC hasnt got autorun enabled.

    That should clean it up enough to go sifting through whats left.

    1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

      Not completely trashed

      From the looks of it, the thing got the virus maybe a couple of weeks ago, and it had been making merry ever since. Until it was plugged into the net and AVG did an auto-update yesterday, there was nothing outwardly wrong. After AVG quaranteened several files, the thing became a bit dead with lots of registry links to now non-existant files, couldn't start any apps, and didn't come back after a reboot.

      PCs always have autorun disabled (but that doesn't stop people using the image viewer on their friends HDD with photos from assignment!)

      A nice application from Sandisk is going to have a look over the external HDD later looking for pictures (although I'm not sure if it spots RAWs or only JPEGs).

      Still, it would be nice to have a Bluray writer for archive. I used to use DAT, but now an 80GB tape wouldn't even last a week, so need something simple enough for SO to use, and bigger than a DVD.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Re Regioned

    As this review does not specify that the drive is region free or otherwise, then the review is a failure. Also, does it work with Linux? I can buy region free drives for a much lower price on ebay, why waste the reviewer's and readers time with this product?

    1. Lottie

      Inputted title

      Looks to me like a regular thinline DVD r/w device in a USB interface housing. A fancy, good looking one, maybe, but still not much more than that.

      FWIW, I took the drive out of an old Packard Bell laptop, fitted an enclosure (about £10 off ebay) and Linux4One (based on Ubunti/ Debian) reads it without issue.

      So assuming this is effectively the same, you shouldn't have a problem if you're running Deb based linux.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    plextor USED to be good

    My original Plex was very good and lasted a long time. The subsequent replacement was not very good (i.e., long lasting AND reliable) so I was pretty much off them after that (not to mention the price premium they always seemed to have). Found it much cheaper to simply buy two different cheaper brands to replace it. Still have my old Plextools though....wish they had kept that up as a freebie...sadly enough for them; they didn't. Just one more reason to NOT buy their product.

    Now, they're a MEH!

  8. jason 7
    Thumb Down

    Plextors = Sony

    I think they are just re-badged Sony Optiarc drives now.

    I know Plextor never actually made any of their drives but they used to write the custom firmware that gave the extra features you were paying for.

    They don't even do that anymore.

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