They should all be pretty much the same as far as compatibility with Win9x goes, but the overall quality will dictate prices a lot. Plextor drives from this era are legendary and for that reason command a price premium. Many HP CDWriter-series drives similarly, because they are rebranded Plextors.

If you just want something that does a really good job reading all kinds of CDs and CD-RWs, I have to put in a good word for my accidentally discovered Samsung SW-252F, which does a stand-up job reading scratched up and banged up CDs. Not sure if it does a good job writing and if my experience is of a good unit, or if these drives were just generally good...

I actually put a PATA DVD-RW into my Win98/W2K dualbooter recently. The only thing it lacks that earlier CD-ROM drives had is the audio control. I loved having a headphone jack and volume control on the front of my oldschool CD-ROM drives.

Windows 98 tends to be pretty flexible with what drives it supports. You can probably find any random IDE one that's in working condition and it'll probably meet your needs. If the computer is new enough, I've gotten away with using SATA drives as well as long as the SATA controller is set to IDE or Legacy mode, though going with a true IDE drive is less likely to give you compatibility issues. A lot of times if it seems like a drive is acting up or is incompatible with something it may be just be dirty and in need of some TLC.

Any ide LG never give me a problem, random and boring looking... yes, but rock solid

As above. But I'd say to stay away from Sony drives, I've had countless die on the job or turn up dead.

deltapi wrote on 2024-05-24, 14:51:

I actually put a PATA DVD-RW into my Win98/W2K dualbooter recently. The only thing it lacks that earlier CD-ROM drives had is the audio control. I loved having a headphone jack and volume control on the front of my oldschool CD-ROM drives.

And... I guess that means you lose the audio for games like CivII that had the audio track as audio CD tracks that were played through the CD audio cable to the sound card rather than digital audio extraction (which didn't exist yet)? Or does your drive at least have the audio cable but not the headphone jack/volume control on the front?

(Interestingly, I also put a NOS PATA DVD-RW into a retro 98 system recently... and... hmm...)

+1 for LG IDE CD-RW drives, I have the CED-8120B. The only downside is that in DOS the CD audio works properly with GSCDROM.SYS in DOS. Other than that, it is excellent.

Another one that I got decent experience is a the Lite-On LTR-52246S except on the noise department when reading CDs. That can be silenced with Nero DriveSpeed or CDBeQuiet! though.

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-05-24, 18:52:

As above. But I'd say to stay away from Sony drives, I've had countless die on the job or turn up dead.

Optiarc too. I had one that added a tiny crack in the middle of each DVD it would take.

I remember Optiarc being a Sony-NEC joint venture. NEC drives were actually good, but I have also had lots of Sony drives fail. Samsung was slightly better, but still not what I would consider good.

Unfortunately, at this point, all of my IDE optical drives have failed, and every drive I get fails a few months later. It doesn't look like any of them are still good 25 years later.

lti wrote on 2024-05-25, 03:50:

I remember Optiarc being a Sony-NEC joint venture. NEC drives were actually good, but I have also had lots of Sony drives fail. Samsung was slightly better, but still not what I would consider good.

Unfortunately, at this point, all of my IDE optical drives have failed, and every drive I get fails a few months later. It doesn't look like any of them are still good 25 years later.

Yeah, I have a PATA laptop ODD to USB thing and I went through three drives I harvested before I found one working one, and it won't go over 2X speed and is even a DVD-RW unit...

EDIT: That said, my SCSI CD-ROM is still working. I wonder why IDE drives are all failing, but SCSI units might still be trudging on...

leonardo wrote on 2024-05-24, 14:45:

Plextor drives from this era are legendary and for that reason command a price premium. Many HP CDWriter-series drives similarly, because they are rebranded Plextors.

That's the last thing I would look for nowadays. Most of these drives are in rough shape, because they were used quite actively.

I bagged some parts a few years ago and I inherited two ide drives.

A NEC ND-2500A which is a dvd-rw

And

A LG gdr-8162b which is just a dvd-rom (no cd-rw either)

Both pata, and run in windows 98 very well. Alcohol 120% picks up the burner just fine.

The only oddity with the nec is sometimes, pressing eject does nothing you need to quit Explorer (not fully but like don't have my computer open) or ensure nothing is actually using the drive (by that I mean if you have say cd player open but not playing a disc, it will refuse to open until closed) in DOS not an issue.

I have a Samsung dvd burner on the way as well. SH-S222L which has lightscribe on it. Not sure there ever was a program for that in 98 but still. Looks like this:

I wouldn't be doing any burning in Win98 unless really necessary. Much better off using a more modern and stable machine.
Other then that agree with the above, no need to geta anything special and analogue audio cable is desirable if using for your games as well.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:19:

Other then that agree with the above, no need to geta anything special and analogue audio cable is desirable if using for your games as well.

If you go for a drive with visible headphone jack on the front, it's almost guaranteed that it will have analog audio output. Otherwise, especially for DVD drives or anything made after 2000, it's a gamble if the drive will have it.

WOW Thank you all for your suggestions! I accidentally had notifications off and I didn't see this epic trove of helpful comments until today! I'll look into all of the recommended drives!

VivienM wrote on 2024-05-24, 21:33:

deltapi wrote on 2024-05-24, 14:51:

I actually put a PATA DVD-RW into my Win98/W2K dualbooter recently. The only thing it lacks that earlier CD-ROM drives had is the audio control. I loved having a headphone jack and volume control on the front of my oldschool CD-ROM drives.

And... I guess that means you lose the audio for games like CivII that had the audio track as audio CD tracks that were played through the CD audio cable to the sound card rather than digital audio extraction (which didn't exist yet)? Or does your drive at least have the audio cable but not the headphone jack/volume control on the front?

(Interestingly, I also put a NOS PATA DVD-RW into a retro 98 system recently... and... hmm...)

The drive in question has the audio out cable on the back - although I don't have the right cable for it, so I had to use female 2.54mm jumper wires like you'd use on an arduino board.
I just miss having the headphone jack and volume control on the front.

My first (and long lost) CDRom drive actually had play/stop/next/prev buttons on it. I can't remember the make though.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:19:

I wouldn't be doing any burning in Win98 unless really necessary. Much better off using a more modern and stable machine.
Other then that agree with the above, no need to geta anything special and analogue audio cable is desirable if using for your games as well.

I have done a few image to cd burring using alcohol 120% fine.
as long as you have a decent burner and a decent machine and providing you leave it to do it's thing it'll be fine from my experience.

Plextor
HP
Pioneer
Panasonic
Creative

chinny22 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:19:

I wouldn't be doing any burning in Win98 unless really necessary. Much better off using a more modern and stable machine.
Other then that agree with the above, no need to geta anything special and analogue audio cable is desirable if using for your games as well.

Ah, the entry to the coaster-casino was about 10 quid when I got my first writer.

Want to burn something? Reboot. IIRC hold shift at boot to prevent anything running at start up. Exit any stuff that does start up and is not actually necessary, even or especially, anti-virus.

Then wait a couple of minutes to allow the machine to settle down. Confirm screen saver is off, because even the load of blank.scr can be too much for 9x.

Now, the CD burn can be attempted..... my quad speed Mitsumi was about 15 minutes to burn a full disk of data, and probably 5+ of faffing about with sessions. And it was fond of failing right at the end, though the annoyance-bias makes those incidents appear prevalent.

Asking 30 minutes of uptime from 9x was always a bit much 😀 When I finally got hold of NT4 (yay to CD writers 😀 ), it was soooo much better.