Buffer Issues.
I haver had a Plextor 12x10x32 burnproof drive since last july (as I paid $170 for it, I don't really feel bad about all these deals. ). The 2MB buffer is enough. I have never gotten a buffer underrun, and the only problem I have ever had to cause costers is when I had my hard drives automatically spin down. The problem was, that the plextor and/or burning software can't seem to deal with a power on event to a hard disk on the same chain. So, lesson learnt, don't use power managment for your HDs while you burn. Besides that, If I'm buring huge files (say a 700MB movie), then even my machine which has 384MB of RAM becomes slow, but I hardly ever have to make use of the burnproof feature. When I burn mp3 CDs, The machine is zippy, and since it doesn't run of memory, I don't have a problem. This is a win2k/linux machine. (oh, and if you get the latest linux cdr utilities, they support burnproof). So basically 700MB CDs take 7 Minutes total (aka 12x burning), and the longest a CD has ever taken me, when I was doing lots and lots of disk stuff so it wasn't able to keep up, was like 10 minutes, but that has only happened a few times. I have burnt 200+ CDs with this drive.