According to the official specs, the drive can do maximum reading speed of CD-ROM at 48x, CD-R at 48x and CD-RW at 40x. Lets start with an 80min pressed Data CD.

80min Pressed Data CD

We have a perfect reading CAV curve with 30.30X average reading speed.

74min Pressed AudioCD

An almost perfect reading curve with 29.28X reading speed.

80min CD-RW

Very good reading speed also with CD-RW media, up to 42.42X at the end.

90min Data CD-R Test Disc

We used a burned 90mins CD-R media, which however wasn't able to be read perfectly from the drive, since it returned lot of errors and after 88-89 mark, it fails to complete the test.

With the newest 1.02 firmware, the drive was able to reach around 89mins, while with the 1.01 firmware, the test fails very early at 20mins.

99min Audio CD-R Test Disc

A rather rare test, since most audio discs are around 80mins. For this test we used a burned 99mins Audio Disc, the drive read the disc till the ~98mins mark and after that point will fail this test.

The newer firmware update didn't seems to improved performance.

- AudioCD Reading

Using ExactAudioCopy (EAC) we can see that the drive does Caching Audio, can produce Accurate Stream and "doesn't" report back C2 errors for accurate AudioCD ripping, which isn't exactly correct, since the drive can report C2 errors, however EAC doesn't seem to support this.

We used ExactAudioCopy with a good shaped Audio disc and measured the "ripping" AudioCD performance under "Secure" and "Burst" Modes. The drive can rip AudioCDs up to 10.2X at Secure mode.

, while at Burst mode reached up to 40.4X with no reported issues

With the Nero CD-DVD Speed Advanced DAE Quality Test, we can create a test disc and make several other tests, in general we see a reading speed of 28.37X and information that the drive can read CD-TEXT, while it is not capable of reading Subchannel Data and Leadin and Leadout information (which may be not so accurate after all). As for the on-the-fly copying, we are sure that the drive can copy on the fly AudioCDs up to 16X.