I'm thinking about replacing the drive that came with my computer because it's way too slow. I only get rip speeds of 3 - 4x in EAC. I don't feel like wasting a good portion of my life ripping cd's, but I do want accurate results. I would be comfortable with speeds of 12 - 15x. So I'm thinking about getting this drive: Lite-On LTR-52327S.

Do you think I will be happy with this purchase?

EDIT:

My current drive is a Samsung CD-R/RW SW-224B

Read: 40x
Write: 24x
Rewrite: 10x

Don't know why it rips so slow...

If you can find a drive that don't cache audio it will rip alot faster. Like the AOpen CRW5224 average read speed of 26x

You may see 12-15x with that drive...and you may not, because when EAC is ripping in secure mode, it is reading all disk sectors a minimum of twice. 52x drives are also stating max speeds...not average. Looks like a solid drive, though.

xen-uno

If you have the room, you may want to look into getting a DVD-Rom drive. They tend not to cache audio.

DVD-rom rips audio cd slower than cdrom, right?

my dvd+rw rips at 14-18x in secure mode

What kind of dvd-rom do you have? I would definetly buy that one!

HP 300n

I recently bought that drive, and am very happy with it. My average speeds are around 5x through 14x (Secure, no C2 and disable cache). It also handles copy protected cds rather nicely...

5x through 14x? hopefully it's closer to the 14x...?

my other drive goes up to 5x and it also seems way too slow.

Starts off at around 5x, speeding up as it gets closer to the edge of the disc. With C2 enabled, it usually starts off around 10x and increases... but I don't fully trust it so I'm willing to be patient.

Edit: I just did a test rip (Enya - Paint the Sky with Stars), and it started at 6x and ended up at just over 13x.

I guess if you care for speed Plextor & PlexTools might be your best bet. Otherwise it only makes a few minutes difference. So why bother?

I guess that's ok...it will be better than what I have to deal with now..

how long does it usually take for extraction to finish? right now i'm looking at 15 minutes for a 60 minute cd.

Well that test rip I mentioned above is just shy of 60 minutes and took me 13 minutes to rip. I use Test & Copy though, so if you don't you can basically halve that time.

Yeah, I don't use test and copy, so it should take me about 6-7 minutes then. That's acceptable. I'm gonna try to pick one up tomorrow. Thanks

I have this drive, which LiteOn sent me as a replacement for my LTR-48246S that bit the dust after about 6 months. The 48246S was excellent until it gave up, but this new drive has been playing up on me right from the first day I've had it: It randomly causes EAC to report "missing samples" on some tracks (on any CD of any condition, even brand-new ones). Re-extracting the affected tracks has so far solved the problem in all cases -- "solved" as in: test and copy CRCs match, suggesting that the rip is OK. Given this suspicious behaviour though, I'm not sure if I should blindly trust these rips.

Having said that (drifting slightly off the topic here), there is also an indication that a possible bug in EAC might be playing a role in this: Anytime the "missing samples" thing happens, the elapsed time display will suddenly go up by something like half an hour. This particular oddness certainly looks much more EAC- than drive-related, I ought to research and perhaps report it at the EAC forums.

Anyway. I'm quite certain that this drive I have here is faulty, and I think I have enough reason not to be pleased with LiteOn given my experiences (also considering that it took them 6 weeks (!) to send me the replacement drive). LG burners look like a far better choice to me at the moment (based on the experiences of fellow IRC visitors).

I just got the drive and it works great! The only problem is it kept slowing down to 2x on a few cd's so I had to disable "allow speed reduction during extraction" in EAC.