I have made backups of almost every game I have and have never had a problem.

I always use my Toshiba DVD drive as the reader and my LiteOn to write. When reading SafeDisk 2 and especially SD 2.51 it takes an amazingly long time to read the disk. But my DVD drive usually finishes in around 12 min. Not bad. But, for the first time, I used my LiteOn drive yesterday and low and behold, it only took 7:43 to read it! For me, that was an amazing speed increase. So, now I use my LiteOn as the reader.

Which DVD reader? That's too long for any Toshi. Using D-Tools 'fast dump' feature, my 1402 can error skip in ~10 seconds; the ASUS 40x writer does it in 3 seconds(!). Without fast dump, my 1402 takes about 20 seconds. You need to establish the bottleneck or cause for your slow reads before progressing to fast dump. btw, even the Litey is slow - it should be under 6' (or even just over).

Well how the heck do I find this bottleneck?

If you haven't already, read this and tick off everything that's 'OK'; remedy that, which is not 'OK' or in doubt. Start with cabling & DMA.