Plextor 716A DVD burner

With the failed CDs keep piling up, finally I am fed up with the degrading performance of both of my CD burners. File archiving becomes ever more important to me with my routine BitTorrent downloads. I decided to pursue a DVD burner. At the beginning, I was surprised to find out that a 16x Sony DWD22A only cost in the low 50s. As I read more user opinion on the web, I concluded Plextor 716A would be the best in the current market and I got an OEM version from newegg.com. I'd like to pay attention to the details this time to avoid piling up failed DVDs, so I spent time reading the manual and found out my 40 conductor IDE cables have been outdated. Then I went on to replace them with 80 conductor IDE cables for both my hard drive and the new acquired DVD drive. I also got a bundle of 25 8x TDK DVD-R from BestBuy for only $9.99 (basically no matter which brand you choose they are all made in Taiwan). Last night I finally used Nero to fire up this baby. The DVD-R was burned quietly at 8x without any problem. I am looking forward to breaking speed record if I have faster disks. This drive can burn CD-R at 48x. I have never achieved 16x with my previous HP CD burner although it is advertised at 16x.