I purchased one of these drives about a week and a half ago and have been very satisfied with its performance. I have a two drive system, and burn all CDs from the secondary drive so that normal OS disk I/O does not prevent the buffer from being emptied. I did attempt to burn 1 CDR from my primary drive with a few other programs accessing the disk, and even the 8MB buffer emptied quickly at 16x, and the write failed. Using the secondary drive, however, I have yet to see it fall below 75%, even during heavy multi-tasking. Also, I have successfully burned 8x rated CDRs at 16X, though maybe half the time I try it is knocked down to 12X. Either way, I can start a burn job and head to the men's room, and when I return its usually finished. One thing that does bother me is the noise. When reading CD's (such as the software installation disks) it is louder than the 6 fan Compaq server across the way. It would be very annoying if I didn't use my normal 40X CD-ROM for CD reading. All in all a very nice product, though I think the 50% cost premium over 12X drives may be a little steep for those that don't do a lot of CD burning.