Those over forty will no doubt crush a little tear when they think of those multiple CD/DVDs burned on Plextor hardware.
Plextor is no more. The Japanese brand has not survived the New Year, and its parent company has decided to pull the plug on a subsidiary that, it has to be said, hasn't meant much to anyone for many years now. Founded in 1985 in the suburbs of Tokyo, Plextor was an emblematic brand of the 90s. A true benchmark in both CD/DVD playback and burning, with optical drives that clearly had no real competition. Whether you needed to read scratched discs or burn recalcitrant DVDs, you could always count on the famous UltraPlex/PlexWriter... provided, of course, that you also had some software like the no less famous Alcohol 120%.
Plextor
Not always very legal, the activities linked to the use of Plextor drives/engravers clearly marked their time, and the increasing scarcity of engraving needs put a stop to the company's business. However, in the 2000s, Plextor had managed its shift to SSDs rather well. The M5 and M6 models - to name but two examples - were highly appreciated SATA units, and while some competitors were handicapped by more or less solid firmware, Plextor was establishing itself as a serious and reliable player. Alas, this conversion was to be the last, and Plextor completely missed its second turn, towards NVMe SSDs.
First acquired by Lite-One, a Taiwanese company, in 2010, Plextor was part of the complete package when the structure was sold to Kioxia, the NAND branch recently separated from Tohsiba. Kioxia bought the Taiwanese company in 2019 for the modest sum of $165 million, and long before that, we'd heard nothing at all about Plextor in Europe. The news came a few days ago: Kioxia has decided to withdraw the Plextor name, and the Solid State Storage Technology (SSSTC) brand will henceforth be used instead.
