How can you fault the Pioneer for being slower than Lite-On, when it's rated 40x compared to Lite-On's 48x?? To credit Pioneer, they actually beat their specs and reach ~43x in many cases, and it reads CD-RWs much faster than Lite-On. On DVD's side though, Lite-On totally kills the competition. But IMO, the best DVD-ROM is still the Toshiba 16x, it's hard to argue how complete of a package this drive provides, and the best CloneCD compatibility to top things off, the only drawback is its slow DVD movie ripping.