Plextor PX-W1210TS firmware

Not very long ago, 12X write-once speeds were the new "big thing"

in burner technology. At that time, though, CD-RW media could still

be written to at only 4X. Soon thereafter, RW write speeds got

bumped up to 8X and 10X, along with a new "high speed only" media

that could not be written to in older 4X and slower rewriters. The

final piece of the puzzle that comprises today's burner was brought

forth by Sanyo with their invention of BURN-Proof. This technology

virtually eliminated the buffer underrun by allowing the burning

process to pause if the drive's buffer had run dry. Later, Ricoh

joined the fray with their own buffer underrun prevention

technology, JustLink.

Meanwhile, as burner technology progressed, manufacturers started

moving away from the traditional but costly SCSI interface, and

ATAPI burners started making their way onto the shelves.

Manufacturers discovered that a properly engineered ATAPI

interface, combined with correctly configured DMA, was able to

deliver performance comparable to SCSI drives. The only caveat was

the vastly inferior flexibility of being limited to two devices per

ATA channel (realistically, one device per channel, to avoid the

further limitations of slaving ATA devices).