Never ANY mechanical problems with either one . Although due to an accident involving my knee, I am no on my second Artec 50X drive, and there's still nothing that can beat it. It reads everything, including CDRW's at blinding speed. I achieve 12x audio extraction without popping, and am still yet to see a drive with such a fast access time. It reads well up to 50X when it needs to, plays audio cd's without ANY noise, and have never had any problems with it.
Manufacturer is great with support and everything.
Just plug it in and its ready. Its is built with the cheapest stuff around and is not durable. It took forever to setup and then worked fine for four months. Its a good audio playback cdrom, but it never did reach 50x speeds, if put it through tons of benchmarks and everythin. Now it busted, I didnt do anythin and now it doesnt even read any cdroms, it wont even play audio cds through its hardware playback feature.