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

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

Plextor is one of the legendary names in client PC storage and has been associated with high quality and performance for nearly three decades. But it looks like Kioxia thinks differently, as it has decided to shut down the Plextor brand for SSDs and use the Solid State Storage Technology (SSSTC) trademark instead, according to a report by HKEPC. SSSTC will focus solely on drives for enterprise, datacenter, and industrial applications.
 
Back in the day I had 3 SCSI Plextor drives in my external SCSI bay on top of my case.
I can't remember if these were caddies or tray versions as I had both back in the day.
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I remember Plextor as the only brand of CD-drive that didn't completely suck. All the other brands would make their drives spin 5 times faster than they could actually read, just so they could advertise higher theoretical speeds. You could literally hear them backing off for like 30 seconds before they managed to negotiate a speed that the read head could keep up with. I never had that problem with Plextor drives.

But yeah, when I think Plextor, I don't think SSDs. I can understand why they did this.
 
I remember when a CDR from them was like 300 bucks in the 90s. I got one and everyone at LAN Parties wouldn't leave me alone wanting to copy every thing they could. This was back in the IPX protocol days before games were internet only and you could actually LAN game giant server filled madness.
 
Zepher said:
Back in the day I had 3 SCSI Plextor drives in my external SCSI bay on top of my case.
I can't remember if these were caddies or tray versions as I had both back in the day.
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Click to expand...
I miss those days more and more. The internet has stolen the excitement and adventure of the BBS and even slow loading AOL on a nice KDS or Sony Trinitron. I miss getting games and hacks off mIRC relays. Back then we called it Warez.
 
The top one i
Zepher said:
Back in the day I had 3 SCSI Plextor drives in my external SCSI bay on top of my case.
I can't remember if these were caddies or tray versions as I had both back in the day.
View attachment 624643
Click to expand...

The top one is the caddy one, as it has the bump out on the tray left side so you can open the door to get the caddy in. The other two look like tray style.
 
The first NVME I ever bought in 2017 was from Plextor. RIP. AFAIK the drive is still working fine, I built a low end PC (Ryzen 2200G, Asrock AB350M Pro4) and gave it to a family member for general usage and haven't heard any complaints.

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Was always a huge fan of Plextor, but to my knowledge they never even tried to dominate the very tiny BD drive burner market. Which is probably what they should've done. Make not only the best drives but the best BD software for both playback of commercial DVD's (handling all the HDCP junk) as well as burning and sold it as a single package. They could've been pushing for that for at least 14 years, but to my knowledge they never did any of that stuff.

As it is, the alternatives are what: LG or Samsung? Not necessarily terrible but also not great.
 
I owned several Plextor burners but never actually bought a Plextor. The trick was finding rebranded gems on the cheap after rebate (of course). RIP.
 
There was something i remember about plextor cd burners back in that day, thought it had to do with it was able to actually copy some forms of disc copy protections that most drives couldnt. My memory is foggy and probably wrong but i swear there was.
 
tangoseal said:
I remember when a CDR from them was like 300 bucks in the 90s. I got one and everyone at LAN Parties wouldn't leave me alone wanting to copy every thing they could. This was back in the IPX protocol days before games were internet only and you could actually LAN game giant server filled madness.
Click to expand...
I worked at a software "rental" store in 1994 and we had an external Plextor CDR for sale, it was $1,200. When I started buying CDR's a couple of years later, my friend and I would split a 5 pack from CompUSA, the discs were $10 each when bought in the 5 pack, I'd pay for 2 and he'd pay for 3.
I remember bringing a couple back to CompUSA since the burn failed and the replaced them.
 
Darunion said:
There was something i remember about plextor cd burners back in that day, thought it had to do with it was able to actually copy some forms of disc copy protections that most drives couldnt. My memory is foggy and probably wrong but i swear there was.
Click to expand...
Maybe it was able to read and write Sony Playstation discs, that sounds vaguely familiar.
 
Zepher said:
I worked at a software "rental" store in 1994 and we had an external Plextor CDR for sale, it was $1,200.
Click to expand...
And nowadays, if for some reason you want one, a USB-powered external one is $15.
 
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Pour some out for the Plextor.

Considering buying one just for giggles. Around $30 on Amazon.

-bZj
 
Zepher said:
I worked at a software "rental" store in 1994 and we had an external Plextor CDR for sale, it was $1,200. When I started buying CDR's a couple of years later, my friend and I would split a 5 pack from CompUSA, the discs were $10 each when bought in the 5 pack, I'd pay for 2 and he'd pay for 3.
I remember bringing a couple back to CompUSA since the burn failed and the replaced them.
Click to expand...
Oh remember Iomega Zip Drives. 100MB haha
 
Haven't heard the name in ages, it died long ago.
 
My buddy's Dad worked for HP in the late 90s. This gave him access to high speed internet and a plextor cd burner....

While most teens were selling candy in the halls, he was selling disc's of porn for $20 a pop.

Let's just say, he made a killing and his "regulars" swung by our lunchroom table about once a week....

He called/labeled them "Supa Discs"... Vol. 1, 2, 3 ,4 and on and on it went lol
 
Darunion said:
There was something i remember about plextor cd burners back in that day, thought it had to do with it was able to actually copy some forms of disc copy protections that most drives couldnt. My memory is foggy and probably wrong but i swear there was.
Click to expand...

w1retap said:
Such a good brand. Just picked up a [used] SCSI version not too long ago for my A2000.

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Amiga Represent!
 
Plextor was indeed the optical drive to have back in the day.

But now I haven't had an Optical drive in any computer I've owned for like 15 years.

I do still have an external USB drive for when I need to rip something though. Last time I used it I made 6 CD's of my mom's favorite music for the CD changer in my old car I gave her.

That was in the summer of 2019.
 
All 3 of my optical drives are Plextor. They make for fantastic DVD movie players.
 
ZodaEX said:
All 3 of my optical drives are Plextor. They make for fantastic DVD movie players.
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I don't understand how you tolerate 480p content in 2024.

I haven't been able to watch DVD's in over 15 years. Once my eyes adjusted to 1080p content, I just can't make myself go back.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I don't understand how you tolerate 480p content in 2024.

I haven't been able to watch DVD's in over 15 years. Once my eyes adjusted to 1080p content, I just can't make myself go back.
Click to expand...
One thing that is (possibly) interesting is that back when HD was "it", downscaling HD to DVD for resale was "ok", but downscaling from 4K to DVD is pretty awful (e.g. an old Marvel movie will look much better on DVD than a new one). Similar to a person with a 32" 720p upgrading to a 65" 4K, it might not be as pretty as you might think. Obviously older stuff pre-HD, can look even better (as far as upscaled DVD can look on an HD screen). Another thing, replacing character shots with "far away" shots... well, of course that's not going to that great, but in all fairness, not sure it's great at 4K.

Anyway, I'm a "right sizer" rather than a "shower", so my preference are things that consistently look and sound great and not necessarily what the world considers to be "the best".

Let's just say I've had people confuse my TV (which is 1080p OLED) as showing HD and even HDR content, when merely showing a DVD (SD) content. YMMV. You don't even want to hear what they think of my bright IPS 32" 720p sets (it would be embarrassing).

In short, there's a lot of "great" crapola out there. Avoid the crap and don't be afraid to embrace what looks good that for whatever reason has an ultra cheap price tag on it.

While harder to do today, I used to bring my "own equipment" into Best Buy etc. to "test" before purchasing. Equipment being simple playback device. Might even be a phone today. And bring another person. The idea being "what looks/sounds best". Instead of "rtings.com said buy this one".
 
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

They were some of the best. I remember having rebadged ones (TDK 12x drive, I believe). So much better than the 4x I had before to where you couldn't touch the PC when it was burning a CD because it'd use too much memory and fuck the buffer up or something, causing the burn to fail. Something like that. Plextor never had that problem. Just constant perfect fast burns every time.

Those Linux ISO's were slow to download at times, but burning them was fast.

They were legendary. I also had no idea they were still around as a brand. I'm not sure I'm good with the new name, though. Like someone else said, sounds like a generic Dollar Tree brand.
 
Looks like a few years later I went with a 2 bay SCSI box and 1 Plextor drive, and what looks like a slot loading SCSI drive below the Plextor.
large_screens.jpg
 
My first CD-ROM drive was a Plextor 4-Plex drive, with 1 MB of memory. I never had any incidents of stuttering on it, even with other processes running in the background, and this was on a Pentium 90 system with 16 MB of memory.

I kept that drive for about 6 years, even using it as a source drive when doing CD-ROM to CD-R direct copying, and I rarely ever made a coaster, since my CD-R drive was also a Plextor drive with plenty of cache.

To say that my Plextor drives paid for themselves several times over is an understatement.

I'm sad to see Plextor die as a brand, but I also must acknowledge that their time in the limelight faded away 2 decades ago. The last Plextor drive I owned was a ATAPI CD-RW drive that was actually made by Sanyo. It worked fine, but it wasn't any better than any of the other offerings at the time.
 
What was that one error that was so prevalent when burning cd's?

Buffer Underrun or something.... I can't recall - I just know I had to burn CD's at 4x max or that would happen and ruin the disc

(I had a Memorex POS 8x back in 99-2000 or so, basically used it exclusively to rent PS1 games and burn copies for my modded system... Having a spindle of PS1 games was mind-boggling at the time heh)
 
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