The difference between 12x and 16x recorders is that the 16x recorders burn 33% faster than 12x recorders. A CD-R recordable disk is measured in minutes--usually 80. A 12x drive will record a full disk in about 7 minutes. A 16x drive will take about 5 minutes. For most applications a 12x drive is sufficient. If you are burning a lot of discs, you may want to consider the 16X, but you will need to make sure that you have a fast computer and hard drive since the data stream cannot be interrupted while writing.