My rips with EAC (most recent), AccurateRip, Windows XP are very slow.
My drives are a Sony DRU-820A and the NEC ND-3520AW, both with most recent firmware.
They're set up on the only IDE connection on my motherboard as cable select.
In XP, Ultra DMA is enabled for both.

Any suggestions?

My EAC settings are in accordance with this post:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=30959

Any help at all would be appreciated.

-Keanon

Could you elaborate on what you mean by slow? Are you getting speeds say around or less than 1x?

Try switching your extraction method to Burst Mode, then rip using Test & Copy. If the test and read CRCs match you have a good rip.

I'd say I get a maximum rip of 7.0x at the disc's end.
Is this to be expected given the secure nature of EAC's ripping methods?

Yes, unless your drives were (and they are not, AKAIK) amongst the few that do not cache audio data and/or can use the -usefua switch (Plextors only?)
See this and this threads.

Sergio

Edit: Well... actually the NEC COULD be a non caching drive... try using Spath's Cache Explorer to figure it out...

Despite all the paranoid misinformation based the Feurio! cache test and not understanding how EAC fetches data, EAC's internal caching test can be trusted.

If the cache is smaller than ~63kB, it is safe to uncheck the caching option.