thanks for the input everybody. yeah getting the serial Plextor was an option, but i only have 2 serial connections on my board and they are used by my hard drives. i've read stories how the the Plextor716SA has some problems with serial controllers, so i decided to not go that route. the 1620 seems to be okay with it on slave. only time will tell how performance will suffer with two optical drivers on one controller. but with a good board and 500W supply, i think they should run smoothly. now my pioneer is running on UDMA4 and 1620 on UDMA2. so i think it was worth changing.