The fact is that it's disc loading time is as any other drive's. But for some reason, it has a 5 second delay of starting to spin up the disc upon insert.
As a consequence, while in my pioneer 106 slot-in DVD-rom the disc is fully loaded after ~10 seconds after insert, using NEC 3520 will take ~15 seconds. That's all. Not a big deal, actually. Every firmware I tried didn't seem to fix that though.
2) Your choise to use another drive as a ripper is wise, but I thought I should let all the factors be known to you anyway...
To further strengthen my case, before posting my comments, I asked one friend of mine who has the same drive, and his review was no different from mine.
Overall, he and I are very satisfied with our purchase, and would definatelly recomend it.