This chart shows DAE speeds as measured by the CDSpeed program. I don't know how accurate of a comparison that is. Seeing the 43.8X DAE in the row for the 62X (my drive) made me wonder what I was doing wrong. I hadn't used EAC before so I grabbed a copy and tried it.

Attached is the result of running EAC in burst mode. It averaged 42.4X for the whole CD. I then tried it in sync mode and averaged 35.4X for the same disc. In secure mode, it got 7.4X and probably would have been just over 9X if it weren't for the errors on tracks 17 & 18. Now I'm curious to see how much faster the 72X drive would be.

To check accuracy, I pushed the .wav's for the 1st track using each of the three methods over to my linux box. I ran cmp against the secure and sync ones and they are identical (as expected). Much to my surprised, the burst mode .wav is also exactly the same as the other two (I'm sure it wouldn't match for the tracks with errors, but I didn't try).

For overall rating, the Plextors tend to come out far ahead of the Kenwoods in user reviews. Many people complain they have trouble with some CD-R(W)s in their Kenwoods and I know Safe-Disc'd games don't work. But for ripping audio, I'm pretty happy with it.