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Getting faster rips in EAC secure mode

Hi Dan,

EAC is one of the most "brutal" of the copying software. It takes me about 25 to 30 minutes to copy the average CD.

It's possible to get much faster rips than this with EAC secure mode by choosing a drive that performs well in EAC. A drive's ripping speed in EAC secure mode is not correlated at all with its performance in any standard read tests. The following result of an EAC drive test seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient criterion for finding a fast EAC ripper:

Accurate Stream: Yes
Audio cache: No
C2 Error Information: Yes

The key here is "Audio cache: No". Much of the time EAC spends ripping in secure mode is spent flushing the cache before each read. If there is no cache, there is no flush and ripping speeds soar. For a drive which has the properties above, configure EAC as follows:

Secure mode
Drive caches audio data: unchecked
Drive is capable of retrieving C2 error information: checked

For such a drive, you should get an average rip speed across the entire disc in EAC secure mode of 22x-24x. This means a rip will take 3 minutes, or 6 minutes for "test and copy". How do you find such a drive? Check the reviews at cdfreaks.com. They often (but not always) include EAC performance in the section of the review on reading performance. Here is an example. You'll need to scroll down the page for EAC tests. Their data shows 15.9x, but that's pessimistic, as they apparently only tested one track of the disc (probably the first one). It gets faster and faster as you get toward the end.

The only negative I've found so far is that drives that are EAC speed demons all tend to have mediocre error correction (not bad, but not nearly as good as the best). For that reason, I have two drives - one that's fast in EAC but with mediocre error correction, and one that has excellent error correction but which is slow in EAC secure mode. I use the latter to rip discs that are scratched or otherwise troublesome to rip.

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