Hi All.
I just got my hands on an older Toshiba CD-ROM (SCSI), bought it for $20AU, I read MaxPayne with it in about 42mins with Hardware assisted fasterror skipping with 3 retries. I then set error skipping to 1 retry, just for tests sake, started to read an image file of MaxPayne again to see if there were any speed differences from 3 retries. There were, it got through the bad sector area much faster, when the reading got to 27%, the program hang, couldn't do anything but re-boot. When re-booting, when the computer got to the Adaptec SCSI device menu it hang again, in fact it hang every time there after at every re-boot. Disconnected my SCSI CD-ROM, wolla, booted fine. Reconnected the drive, hung again.(tried on 2 computers)
Due to my experiment the CD-ROM has failed to work ever again.
Wheter this happened due to extra stress on the drive, or due to being a few years old and (second-hand) I can't tell. But it was a mistake to try going lower than the default retries (the drive worked fine before the experimentation).
I just wanted to share my experience.
JediMaster