Plextor (styled PLEXTOR) ( zh, 浦科特; ) is a Taiwanese (formerly Japanese) consumer electronics

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and ...

, best known for

solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk. SSDs rely on non- ...

s and

optical disc drive In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can on ...

Company

The brand name Plextor was used for all products manufactured by the Electronic Equipment Division and Printing Equipment Division of the Japanese company ''Plextor Inc.'', which was a 100%-owned subsidiary company of '' Shinano Kenshi Corp.'', also a Japanese company. The brand was formerly known as TEXEL, under which name it introduced its first

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

optical disc drive in 1989. The brand has been used for

flash memory Flash memory is an Integrated circuit, electronic Non-volatile memory, non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for t ...

products, Blu-ray players and burners, DVD-ROM burners, CD-ROM burners, DVD and CD media, network

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s, portable hard disks,

digital video recorder A digital video recorder (DVR), also referred to as a personal video recorder (PVR) particularly in Canadian and British English, is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SS ...

s, and

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

drives. The brand Plextor was in 2010 licensed to ''Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions Corporation'', a subsidiary company of '' Lite-On Technology Corporation''. Therefore, all the Plextor products since then, especially

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses Integrated circuit, integrated circuits to store data persistence (computer science), persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-stat ...

s, are of a Taiwanese, not a Japanese brand. However, the Japanese company ''Plextor Inc.'', who originated this brand name, continues, and sells new products under other brands such as PLEXLOGGER and PLEXTALK. On September 3, 2019, it was announced Lite-On would sell its SSD business to Toshiba Memory, which is now known as

Kioxia Kioxia Holdings Corporation () is a Japanese multinational computer memory manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The company was spun off from the Toshiba conglomerate in June 2018 and gained its current name in October 2019; it is curren ...

. On January 10, 2024, Kioxia stopped using the brand name because of failure to adapt to the market as a result of neglecting to adapt PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 controllers. Plextor is now a brand from

Ritek RITEK Corporation is a Taiwanese company that manufactures optical discs such as compact disc, compact discs (CDs), DVD, DVDs, and Blu-ray, as well as storage cards such as CompactFlash cards, SD cards and MultiMediaCard, MultiMediaCards, Flash ...

Products

Plextor introduced its first solid state drives, the M1 SSD series available in 64 GB and 128 GB capacities. The M2 Series followed, which they claimed to be the first SATA 3 SSD available at the time. In October 2011, Plextor announced the M2P Series with increased performance. In December 2011 and January 2012, Plextor released the M3 and M3 Pro Series in 64 to 512 GB capacities. Similar to its predecessor, the M3 is a SATA 6 Gbit/s interface with a Marvell chip set. New, is the 24 nm Toggle NAND Flash (instead of 32 nm Toggle NAND Flash used for the M1, M2, and M2P).

Optical drives

Plextor

optical drive In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disk drive, disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some driv ...

s are known for having an extended functionality and command set for

power users A power user is a user of computers, software and other electronic devices who uses advanced features of computer hardware, operating systems, programs, or websites which are not used by the average user. A power user might not have extensive tech ...

, that has not been adapted by other optical drive vendors. This functionality includes extended surface error scanning,QPxTool FAQ – Extended error scanning
/ref> ''

GigaRec CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can only be written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) are readable by most CD readers manufactured prior to t ...

'' (higher density recording on CDs, similar to the DDCD ''"Purple Book"'' standard), '' VariRec'' (laser power calibration), and ''"Silent Mode"'', which has the ability to adjust the ejection and loading speed of the disc tray and to limit the rotation speed of the disc.''cdvdcontrol'' utility manual (revision 2014-02-26)
/ref> To make use of those features, Plextor provided a paid suite of tools called "PlexTools". In 2005, the parent company of Plextor, Shinano Kenshi, tried to thwart the creation of free and open-source alternatives to PlexTools by legally threatening third-party developers.

References

{{Major information storage companies Computer storage companies Electronics companies of Japan Electronics companies of Taiwan Japanese brands Taiwanese brands Computer companies established in 1985 1985 establishments in Taiwan Optical computer storage