Is it important to have a fast CD-ROM? Does 300ms vs 700ms really matter?
It depends on what applications you will be using. Many CD-ROMs are just big archives of stuff, and you can copy individual programs to your hard disk before using them so speed is not really very important. But if you are going to be using large ramdom-access databases, or any kind of interactive multi-media applications, then the speed difference is very noticeable.
