Ended up with a Benq-based (is it actually Benq making them?) generic burner of similar numbers, and it's the most silent CD movement I've heard since the 1x days. (More confusingly, all the control chipsets within the drives are made by third parties now, too.)* Underrun protection sure does make life easy... but be careful, as some drives (like mine) do power calibration after each restart, and there's apparently only a limited number of power calibration sectors (well, partitions-of-physical-area) per blank.
Edit: (Of course, if you've properly throttled to 26x, you're probably golden, maybe.)
Now when "Mt. Rainier" gets a bit more common in the world, maybe these things will be slightly more like floppies, and slightly less like computer-controlled record players!
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*Upshot of Lite-On is that they're possibly the biggest manufacturer of CD movements in the world, so while there are, for instance, MacOS 9 hacks to make the native burning support handle Lite-On drives, I'm somewhat in the cold with that machine and its equally MMC-compliant Benq.
