Plextor to exit Optical Drive Markets

[Mercutio]

Plextor's Japanese parent has announced plans to exit optical drive markets, according to These guys. This should surprise no one who has seen a price list lately, but I imagine that huge swathes of the computer trade press will now have to find a new optical drive vendor whose nob they can collectively gobble.

 

[Tea]

They still exist?

Hmmm ... I suppose they will knob-gobble Pioneer now. I have no idea why, very ordinary drives, if you ask me.

 

[Bozo]

That's a shame. I have about 50 Plextors of various flavors deployed at work. Some in a pretty hostile industrial envirnment. Never had one fail. That's more than I can say for the non-Plextor optical drives I've used.

Bozo :joker:

 

[sechs]

The way I read it, they are leaving the consumer CD and DVD drive markets, which are highly commoditised. Money is made on cheap, not quality.

It's not clear to me if they will continue in the OEM market for these, or if they will continue with other optical drives.

 

[CityK]

Plextor Denies Plan to Cease Optical Drive Production


This reminds me of this case

Seems like there are a greater number of false reports being generated these days. Here I'll start one:

"Microsoft recalls all shipments of their new Vista operating system from retail distribution! AP

Sources cite senior company officials as saying that the unprecedented last second recall was due to serious flaws which remained in the shipping version, though they would not cite exactly what those issues were.

The boxed version of the company's next generation operation system has been shipping to retail networks for weeks, and was scheduled to hit shelves in just a few days. Now with the general recall, it is unclear when Microsoft will make the product available to consumers.

Some industry analysts suggested that, as opposed to an actual recall of the physical boxed product, Microsoft may have only sent out a request to its retail partners to temporarily delay the release until the Redmond, Wa. company could make a corrective series of patches available on its online update service.

It is unclear whether what affect any delay will have on on company revenues. When contacted, Microsoft officials would not comment on this story."

 

[Platform]

...Never had one fail.

...which is not my experience 3 ~ 4 years ago.

I know there was an era when Plextor opticals were built quite well (the 8x and 16x CD-R/W period), because I used them (at work). But, starting around the 40x CD-R/W period, I had some of these overpriced Plextor drives to die suddenly for no good reason or get to the point to where they would not write CD-Rs that were readable by any other CD reader. I recall talk from a lot of other people echoing similar failures with Plextor 40x and later CD-R/W drives.

About that time, out of necessity, I jumped off the Plextor bandwagon to the cheap-o LiteON drives and never looked back. The LiteONs were excellent performers for dirt cheap. And, the failure rate was low.

I've used many brands and models of CD-R/W over the years. As a whole, the most reliable CD-R/W drives I ever used were Yamahas. Until just a few months ago, there were some Yamaha 4x and 8x SCSI drives that were in daily service going back to 1997 and 1998. Those drives started life off as standalone writers, but ended up going into CD duplicating towers over the past few years to replace other (Teac and Plextor) SCSI CD-R/W drives that had failed. I'm sure many of those Yamaha drives had logged close to 100K CD-R written!

There were also some 16x SCSI Yamahas that were still being used until a couple of years ago (these writers could be loud as hell at times, but it didn't seem to hurt their longevity).