I think everyone knows how much I love Plextor drives, it almost goes without saying. To be fair, this drive reviewed on its own would likely have scored higher - it is a very good drive to be sure. About the only real disappointment with it is the inability to read audio copy protected disks - which isn't a huge issue until you know, decent music gets protected. But facts are facts, the Lite-On is a faster drive. Depending on the media, seriously faster. Ripping speeds are about the same and really aren't noticeably faster than 24 and 32x drives, so if speed is your only reason for making the jump to 40x, skip it unless you are using 16x or lower. There just isn't any point to it.