I saw my friends doing that and stayed out of that game completely until Plextor released their first 8x burner -- the PR-820.

By then, it was all pretty well sorted despite that burner having no underrun protection.

The IBM Ultrastar 9ES drives kept it fed very well on that otherwise quite slow Slackware box.

Burn a CD, compile a kernel, and browse the web while watching some VCD rip of a music video in one corner of the screen? No problem.