->  TW> And Nero comes with a neat utility that does a transfer speed test,

->         Yep ! I saw that too.

 I ran it on several of my CD drives. And as I had expected the
Manfacturers are very optimistic about their transfer speeds. OF course
they did their testing in the Lab and the "Real World" quite often is
Different.      
 Bench marking computer devices is very difficult as there are just too
many variables.
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