This means CAV drives are incapable of achieving their maximum performance on any disc which is not completely full - about 650Mb of data. Since many discs aren't completely full, the actual average performance of a CAV drive, taken over all CD-ROMs, is about half of its rated speed. Just don't believe the hype. The seek speed of CLV drives is made even worse by the fact that they have to change the disc speed when accessing different areas, and this takes a significant fraction of a second, too. Seek speed is the real issue in CD-ROM performance.
Any current drive can deliver data plenty fast enough - once it's got to it.
Copyright Daniel Rutter 1998-2001.