Interesting points indeed.
It really is funny that now the software is the limit of these data buses. I'd never have imagined it - I thought from the bus was there, it'd get maxxed. But I guess protocol is what drives all hardware.
Ken, I've experimented with buffer sizes up to 80 megs in decryptor and in nero. As expected, they didn't make that much difference, as the problem was never getting data off the hard drive, but putting it on the disk