See
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 9586#39586 .
To that post I will also add that the 166S, while somewhat noisy when doing high speed data extraction, is no noisier than other high speed drives. Also, this noise isn't an issue during audio CD or DVD playback, because during playback of such material the drive spins very slowly (~2x) and is completely quiet.
It reads CDs, both digital and audio, at 48x CAV and DVD's at 16x CAV, so it is quite fast. And the read quality is good, with few to no errors on clean media. I can personally verify that it reads CDs sigificantly better than my old AOpen 50x CD-ROM drive.
You might also want to view the spec page on the LiteOn site:
http://www.jlms.com.tw/new_p_E/jlms_165X.htm
cfitz