Pros: reasonably fast, can be coaxed to work reliably.

Cons: extremely picky about media and software. failure rate is extremely high unless you use the recommended media (verbatim) and a good burning program (on the mac, this is toast).

Overall Review: absolutely will not work with built-in or free burning software on the mac (hdiutil, DiskUtility, Finder, cdrecord, etc), and no mac software is included, so don't buy unless you already own toast or are willing to shell out another hundred bucks or so for it. the included nero software works well enough on windows. mac users will also have trouble with respect to firmware upgrades - you'll have to find a windows box to upgrade the firmware (and you'll probably have to upgrade the firmware to get good results). after upgrading the firmware, getting the recommended verbatim blank media, and switching to toast, I've been able to burn very reliably, but it was a pain to figure this all out for myself....