Hi Audrey,
don't get carried away with the hype. A friend of mine had a previous generation Yamaha writer, which was the fastest available at that time, and reverted back to his Phillips drive because it was much more reliable, even if slower.

24 speed means just that, 24 times the normal cd speed. So if an audio cd is 48 minutes of music at normal speed, it will be written in 2 minutes at 24 speed.

However speeds like this make the writer highly critical of the quality of blank cds. If you buy the cheapest blanks, you may run into trouble with reliability of the finished cds (which is what happened to my friend). Everyone has the occasional failed cd, if this becomes commonplace every few cds it is very annoying. If you have to slow down to prevent failures, you've wasted your money getting such a fast machine.

You are paying a high premium for the speed of this writer. If you do not use the high speed you have wasted your money. To use the highest speeds you may have to buy more expensive branded blank cds.

I use cheap cds because I'm constantly updating the archives, so just throw the old ones away. It's your choice.