27" iMac Optical drive speeds

I am on my third 27" iMac in the span of seven days. First one had a dead FireWire port so I couldn't move my data from my 24" iMac. The second one had an optical drive that seemed painfully slow.
Transferring student projects from DVDs and CDs to my hard drive seemed to take far too long. Below are some samples:
256 mb took 7 minutes
482 mb took 11 minutes
117 mb took 2 minutes
267 mb took 6 minutes
I could put the same disc in my seven year old PowerBook and the files would generally copy in about half the time and that's on battery power too.
I took the iMac back and got another one. I am not sure about this one either!
An example:
187 mb took 4 minutes. I restarted, and tried the same disc and it took two minutes. Something strange is going on. Do these speeds seem slow or am I all wet?
What kind of performance is everyone else getting?
Bill
Message was edited by: Bilbo Bowman

It makes sense that the optical drive would be more efficient on a newer machine, but keep in mind also the little things: Did you run any other applications in the background during the transfer or use the computer while it was going on? Things like that that may not seem to matter actually can slow down the machine a significant amount.

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