Plextor
 | |
| Industry | Computer hardware |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1985 |
| Products | SSDs, Optical disc drives, Networking tools |
| Website | www.plextor.com |
Plextor (Chinese: 浦科特; Japanese: プレクスター) is a Taiwanese brand (however, a Japanese one before 2010) best known for its optical disc recorders and SSDs.
The brand name Plextor was used for all products manufactured by the Electronic Equipment Division and Printing Equipment Division of the Japanese company Plextor Inc., which was and is a 100%-owned subsidiary company of Shinano Kenshi Corp., also a Japanese company. The brand was formerly known as TEXEL by which name it introduced its first CD-ROM optical disc drive in 1989. The brand is used for CD-ROM/burnners, DVD-ROM/burnners, CD/DVD media, Blu-ray players/burners, network hard disks, portable hard disks, digital video recorder, floppy disk drives, and flash memory products.
The brand Plextor was in 2010 licensed to Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions Corporation, a subsidiary company of Lite-On Technology Corporation. Therefore, all the Plextor products since then, especially SSDs, are of a Taiwanese, not a Japanese brand. However, the Japanese company Plextor Inc., who gave this brand its birth, does continue and sells new products under other brand such as PLEXLOGGER and PLEXTALK.
Products
Plextor were the producers of the consumer perceived de facto standard for the highest quality optical drives (mainly CD-R/RW) in the 1990s. Their success was due to the outstanding durability of their in-house early products and the reliability of the discs created with their drives. The consensus among early optical media burning adopters was that a Plextor drive practically guaranteed that burned media created during the early times of burned optical media (late '89 - early '90s) would result in a fewer number of 'coasters' (improperly burned optical media). This quality was reflected in their prices, which were some of the highest in the marketplace ($250–350USD for a 4x CD-R burner in 1995). The current price difference between a Plextor branded product and its OEM equivalent is about threefold.
In effort to strengthening it storage leader position, Plextor introduces its first-ever Solid State Drives, the M1 SSD Series available in 64GB and 128GB capacities. Soon after its M1 release, Plextor released the M2 Series 128GB, and 256GB, available in 64, using SATA 6Gbit/s interface, which they claimed to be the first SATA 3 SSD available at the time.
In October 2011, Plextor announced the limited edition M2P Series which boast significant increase in speed performance from its M2 Series. Notably, Plextor introduced "ironclad" 5-year warranty for its SSD, making them one of the few manufacturers to do so. In addition to the 5-year warranty, Plextor also introduced its exclusive TrueSpeed Technology with the M2P series. True Speed Technology is designed to maintain a high speed rate in the real-world computing environment. It consistently works to maintain original performance levels in the long term and without the severe write speed degradation that can occur with other SSDs.
In December 2011 and January 2012, Plextor released the M3 and M3 Pro Series in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. Similar to its predecessor, the M3 is a SATA 6Gbit/s interface with a Marvell chip set. New, is the 24 nm Toggle NAND Flash (instead of 32 nm Toggle NAND Flash used for the M1, M2, and M2P). Sequential read/write speed of the M3 Series max at 540/450 MB/s while the random read/write speed max out at 75,000/69,000.
External links
- Plextor Worldwide
- (Japanese) Plextor Co., Ltd. (Japan)
- Plextor, Inc. (United States)
- Features list for individual drives with link to latest firmware
