Plextor PX-W1210TS firmware 1.06

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).