In our review of the DVD-304S we encountered a serious issue with reading CD-RW media. Basically, as long as sequential reads were done, there were no problems. But as soon as random accesses were thrown into the mix, we´d immediately get read errors and blue screens from Windows. We are happy to report that this problem is not present in the DVD-305S. Transfer rates with our Verbatim CD-RW test disc were 16X at the innermost tracks, increasing to 32X at the outer tracks. Again, we have results nearly identical to Pioneer´s DVD-115. The 305S was able to read 4X CD-RWs from Verbatim, Memorex and Sony without problem, as well as our high speed CD-RW from TDK. In all cases read speeds were 32X CAV.