I guess a lot of it depends on how much you want to spend. The best burner right now is the Plexor but thats pretty pricey. If you want something fairly cheap but reliable go for an LG as they use the same guts as the Plexor (or so I'm told). Other good brands include A-Open and HP. As for speed well it depends how much of a rush you are in. Burning a disk at 8x will take about 7-8 minutes or so but you also have to take into consideration how fast your computer is and how much ram you have. Hope that helps.