News Kioxia reportedly kills off 30-year-old Plextor brand — icon of the optical drive days spins up its last SSD

[Admin]

Kioxia drops Plextor brand in favor of SSSTC.

Kioxia reportedly kills off 30-year-old Plextor brand — icon of the optical drive days spins up its last SSD : Read more

 

[thestryker]

Plextor used to be the best when it came to optical drives, but their management opted to effectively sell off the name so that ended in the late 00s-early 10s. I understand why the optical market has died, but it's really unfortunate that the only innovation there seems to be Panasonic now. Everyone else seems to be perfectly happy just re-releasing the same thing over and over.

 

[magbarn]

Their CD writers were top notch, the best also for ripping CDs. One drive even came with a special mode that used bigger pits to make the disc easier to read at the loss of some play time. Loaded them all in my Alpine 6 CD changer at the turn of the century. Man, I'm old.

 

[pclaughton]

Giving that kind of brand recognition away for no reason seems crazy to me. It would be like trying to rename Twitt... oh.

 

[Math Geek]

I know the name but never knew they made ssd's

They were always top quality optical drives to me.

 

[ThatMouse]

The Plextor brand is pretty worthless. They let it die a decade ago.

 

[vanadiel007]

I still have a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM and a SCSI 24x writer. I will keep them as they might be worth big bucks some day, who knows.

 

[bit_user]

I still have a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM and a SCSI 24x writer. I will keep them as they might be worth big bucks some day, who knows.

I still have the last Plextor-designed DVD-RW drive, which I use for CD ripping. It was IDE, which is the reason I need an IDE controller card. If you see a Plextor drive that's SATA, it's a rebadge - not one they designed.

 

[thestryker]

If you see a Plextor drive that's SATA, it's a rebadge - not one they designed.

That's not quite accurate as a few of their IDE models from pre-2007 also had SATA versions, but they never had a SATA only drive that I'm aware of. They also made at least one Blu-ray drive before bailing on the market... well the market becoming a race to the bottom which eventually destroyed the entire thing.

 

[bit_user]

That's not quite accurate as a few of their IDE models from pre-2007 also had SATA versions, but they never had a SATA only drive that I'm aware of.

I dunno, man. I was pretty active on CDFreaks.com (at least, I think that was the site) and word was you couldn't buy a genuine Plextor-designed drive that was SATA - those were all rebadges. Maybe some of the rebadged drives also came in IDE flavors, though. I could definitely see that.

 

[thestryker]

I dunno, man. I was pretty active on CDFreaks.com (IIRC) and word was you couldn't buy a genuine Plextor-designed drive that was SATA - they were all rebadges. Maybe some of the rebadged drives also came in IDE flavors, though. I could definitely see that.

They subcontracted before rebadging so maybe that's what you're thinking of? Most of the 700 series drives were designed by Plextor (some were rebadges), but they made none of those in their factory in Japan. That was left for the studio grade products until they shut it down too.

 

[jp7189]

The Plextor brand is pretty worthless. They let it die a decade ago.

That's still a way better name than SSSS(how many S's?) TC.

 

[TheOtherOne]

Their CD writers were top notch, the best also for ripping CDs. One drive even came with a special mode that used bigger pits to make the disc easier to read at the loss of some play time. Loaded them all in my Alpine 6 CD changer at the turn of the century. Man, I'm old.

I had one of those too! And if I remember correctly, their "Overburn" feature (they had the best one even if they didn't introduce/invented it) was great. Could write upto 100 or some odd MB more data onto standard 700MB CD-R. 😀

 

[g-unit1111]

Aw man this sucks. I've owned many Plextor drives in the past - internal, external, you name it. They will be missed.