Ok. I have been ripping and encoding cds using the EAC/lame 3.91 combo for about a week now. Typically, the time needed for extraction alone (i.e. no compression) for a cd is about 25 minutes. To put it another way, my Plexwriter 8/4/32 seemed to average about 2.7x. Anyway, I had my optical drive set up as a master on the second IDE cable. This morning I installed a third hard drive (which I haven't got working yet BTW). Per the instruction manual for the hard drive, I installed *it* as the master and made the optical drive the slave. Now the next two cds I've ripped have taken only 5 minutes each (or an average of 9.8X). Obviously, that's a huge difference, and I should be thrilled, but I'm wondering why that would change so dramatically all of a sudden. My bigger concern is that maybe the quality of rips is not as good, even though I haven't changed any settings. Any ideas?