Also home DVD players (especially existing models) may (not sure on this) have trouble reading discs burned at 8X?
Doesn't matter to me since I don't own a DVD player. I'm been buying DVDs since November so I wanted to get a DVD-Rom drive now so I can start to watch them. I might get a DVD player to hook up to my tv next year so maybe those models can handle the 8x media.
I'd rather have a 4x writer with faster CD reading and writing speeds. You'll probably have to sell a kidney to afford 8x DVD media at first.
It depends on your preferences and how your going to use the drives. This is where I differ from alot of other people. I have a 52x CD-Rom drive which I use to play audio CDs and to install software. I also have a CD-RW drive - the plextor 24x/10x/40x which I use to install software and burn CDs ( I find that if I play audio CDs it is noisy. )
If I were to get a dual DVD burner, say the Sony DRU-510A, its CD speeds are 24x/16x/32x which is very close to my CD-RW drive. I would use it to play DVDs (mainly DVD movies), to burn DVDs, and to play audio CDs. However I would probably not use it to burn CDs since that is what my CD-RW drive is for.
Also I was planning on upgrading my CD-RW drive to the Plextor Premium which has the current and fastest CD speeds: 52x/32x/52x which is almost twice as fast. I don't see a point in using a DVD burner to burn CDs when I have a CD-RW drive that is faster and better suited to burn CDs. In other words a DVD drive should be used for its main purpose DVDs and a CD drive should be used for its main purpose CDs.
The fact that DVD burners can also burn CDs is great but to me that is an "extra" or "side " feature that is nice to have but I'll probably would rarely use. It would only come into play if I wanted to burn 2 CDs at the same time ( since I have never done that, does that mean you have to run 2 burning programs at the same time - one for each burner? )
So, in the end, if I had a choice of getting a 4x DVD burner with fast CD Speeds
or an 8x DVD burner with regular CD speeds - no contest, I will always take the 8x DVD burner every time.