The Cyberdrive 40/16/48 CD-RW. I stumbled across this drive on cdrinfo.com while reading the review for the Yamaha F1. There is unfortunately no official review for this drive that I could find on cdrinfo.com, but the comparison specs under the DAE section of the Yamaha drive made it quite clear this is one of the best drives available for ripping. It has nice high speeds in EAC using secure mode (I've seen 10-16X on everything but badly scratched CD's), and it reports some of the lowest error rates on their bad CD test, doesn't choke and even keeps up a higher average speed than most drives. The real winning ability in my book is that it can detect and read all copy protected CD's tested without any problems.

I've been very happy with my liteon 24/12/40 . Works great, has low+12/-6 offsets (so you don't need offset correction) And it rips really fast with feurio. Not such a great drive with eac as far as speed, but what drive is? Now if only feurio would get mpc and ape2 support!

I'm kinda partial to Plextor drives. My trusty old SCSI UltraPlex 40x is still churning out great DAE after 5+ years, and my Plextor 24/10/40A CD-RW is also an exceptional drive. I'm sure other drives out there have caught up to Plextor's quality, but for me there's no reason to change at this point. I suppose the Cyberdrive is worthy of a look should I be in the market for a new drive someday. Thanks for the pointer.

Daffy

I've got the 24/10/40A and really like it too... altho I gotta say I've never had a problematic CD-RW drive yet. My last two were both AOpen, great drives.

I've long been a Plextor fan, they make great drives. However, their newer drives don't do as well on copy protected CD's and don't do as well on really bad CD's. The Cyberdrive completed the Bad CD test with under 1% total disk errors, the 48X Plextor turns in 35%. The 48X Cyberdrive doesn't do as well either. Only the 40/16/48 CW078D does this well. Another selling point is that you can pick it up online for about $43 USD including shipping. I'd been living with my TEAC 16X CD-R drive waiting for something tht turned in great scores on the error tests and the copy protection tests. With good media any decent CD drive will burn good disks and the quality of the optics hinted at by the great error scores gives me warm fuzzy feelings despite the lack of a full review. I got all excited by the Yamaha F1 and their master quality CD burning technology, but the error scores and inability to handle copy protected disks knocked it off my list. I primarily rip Audio CD's with my drive so these features are really key, especially as copy protection takes off.

To sumarize:
- Perfect performance with Copy Protected CD's (reads and rips everything with no added work or errors)
- Decently fast Secure DAE in EAC (fast enough to make my processor the limitation on my 1.3Ghz Athlon)
- Excellent performance with really scratched CD's. 0.7% total errors on cdrinfo.com's bad disk test.
- Fast overall performance on CD burning and CD-RW
- Low cost, for $40 might as well have one just to handle those copy protected CD's