I have this drive so I will respond to some of the comments.
The drive actually starts at 12X CAV on a burn and around the 14 minute mark reaches 16X, converts to CLV and stays there.
This drive is vulnerable to making coasters but burnproof or SCSI is the only thing that is going to save any 16X from that. Keep in mind that we have no comparison piece here, could be that the Plextors and TDKs will be just as bad, burnproof will keep the disc from faulting but it may have to stop and start so many times that it makes the burn process longer than a 12X. I have the IDE version and wish I had gone SCSI, but I can't guarantee it would have made a difference seeing how I havn't used the SCSI version. I have however burned many discs succesfully at 16X...just not while I was using my computer at the same time.
To me the most impressive spec of this drive is not it's burn speed it is it's DAE speed. I have personally seen this drive reach 36X audio extraction and that wasn't even on a full 74 or 80 min CD (about 72 minutes as I remember). This speed is the reason why I bought the drive due to the fact that I am in the process of ripping ALL 300+ of my CD's into MP3. This drive will rip the audio track faster than my PIII 600 oc'd to 900 will encode it.....that's impressive to me.
If you are willing to burn at 12X instead of 16X or let your machine sit while you are burning the disc then there are no real weaknesses to this drive. I can't speak from experience about the subchannel data part from experience because I havn't tried CloneCD or any other programs like it with the drive yet, although as I remember storagereview.com said that it was supported and worked.
Just my $.02 so do what you want with it.
Eric