Riplock is an artificial restriction of read speed to discourage ripping of discs that your drive will read. If it's going to take longer to rip than it would to drive to the store and buy another copy, what are you more likely to do?
LOL. Valid point and I know riplock is artificial. For normal DVD my understanding has always been that it kicks in when CCS was detected however I find that to not be the case with many drives. Older real Plextor drives allowed you to bypass riplock by holding the eject button for 3 seconds until the light blinked 3 times. They were speed demons. The LG GSA-H55N and GSA-H55L drives are good drives but slow and even with patched firmware to remove riplock I still find that woefully slow. The Samsung SH-S223F is an amazing SATA drive once you patch the firmware. For that drive you need to use a patcher by C0deking. That drive is the fastest drive in terms of reading that I've come across. Not the best burner but for ripping my DVDs and CDs it is beautiful and it's relegated to only that role on my system. I have a dedicated reader, dedicated burner, and then there is my drive only used for HD-DVD/BluRay reading. Each has its own limited job.
Anyway, my point about the lifespan of the drive and the speed was that I didn't know riplock existed for HD-DVD/BluRay reading drives and it's one thing to read at say 7 MB/s but I wonder at what point the speed of reading will begin to increase the chance of errors with HD-DVD/BluRay. Extended use at higher speeds could wear out the drive quicker. I'm not overly concerned because in a year or so I'll likely have upgraded to a burner anyway but it's something that did cross my mind.