[rjc3]

hopefully someone can shed some light on why my rip speeds are so low with my external firewire cd-rw. I have a Pismo 400 OS X.1.3, 512 RAM with the original drive bay cd/dvd drive. I also have a Yamaha 16x10x40 cdrw in an ADS Pyro (non 911) firewire enclosure. I don't recall what the cd speed is on the original cd/dvd drive that came with the Pismo, but I know it was slower than the Yamaha's 40x. So naturally I expected that my ripping in iTunes would benefit from the added speed of the external drive. To my surpirse, the external firewire drive was slower than the stock drive! I get ~3x speeds with the original drive, but under 2x with the firewire drive. What gives?!?

[tinrib]

The thing that makes encoding slow isn't the reading from the CD it's the converting. If you copy the original .aiffs from the CD onto your HD you'll get them very fast, but then when you try to encode them it will still be slow. The best way to speed up encoding is to quit other resource hogging apps such as IE, and give iTunes as much processing power as possible.

[rjc3]

hmm, that makes sense. But why would my encoding speeds be slower with my external than with my internal?