Outside

This is the Plextor 504-UF. As you will see later, this drive is identical to the 504-A except in an external enclosure.

For an external drive, aesthetics play quite an important role and this drive succeeds without falter. The body is made of a sleak curvy plastic with silver finish. The front panel as acrylic, with the same silver colour behind it, much like the Shuttle cases. Going by it's measurements of 184 x 52 x 265 mm, it should sit quite comfortably on top of one as well, kept in place by its rubber feet.

For the drives full specifications, we recommend reading here, but in breif that it writes DVD+R media at 4x, DVD+RW at 2.4x. It writes CD/CDRW media at 16x. It does not write DVD-R or -RW discs. This is a little unfortunate, especially considering how most drives on the market now support both these standards, just like it's bigger 8x brother, the 708UF.

As far as the interface is concerned, it has the ability to connect via USB 2.0 using an NEC IDE-USB 2.0 bridge chip and firewire using an Epson chip.

Here is a view from the back where you can just make out the switch required to choose between USB or Firewire mode. Note the addition of composite audio out.

The Plextor drive requires external power as one might expect. Taking into account its size, this drive was never really intended for the laptop market so I don't see this as a down side.

For size comparison, here is a PlexWriter external CD Writer drive.

The drive above is only just bigger than the size of a CD. So what makes the two technologies so different? Simply put, the above is a slimline CD Writer drive inside an enclosure, while the 504-UF is a full-size DVD-Writer inside an enclosure. It would be nice if they produced a version of this drive that used a slimline drive instead. This would please people on the move, such as laptop users, but at a price premium. Perhaps this is something that will be produced in the future.

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