Jorpho wrote:

It might get noisy when it spins up, but there are ways to suppress that if it annoys you.

For example?

devius wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

It might get noisy when it spins up, but there are ways to suppress that if it annoys you.

For example?

By limiting the maximum speed at which the drive runs, or minimizing the amount of vibrations transmitted through the drive bay...

I've had good luck with Matsushita/Panasonic and LG drives in the past.

For a very long time, the best cd drives were made by Plextor. In their day, they were fast, quiet and reliable. That said, they just gave up when dvd and cd-r came around. Lite-On took the throne as the fastest drives. Quite a few Plextor drives simply don't read cd-r disks. Thankfully I found a cheap ide > scsi converter and I use that a generic new dvd/ram and I have no issues on my old scsi systems.

I've had good luck with NEC, Liteon, Sony, Toshiba, and Ricoh.

yawetaG wrote:

devius wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

It might get noisy when it spins up, but there are ways to suppress that if it annoys you.

For example?

By limiting the maximum speed at which the drive runs

And how is that accomplished exactly?

devius wrote:

yawetaG wrote:

By limiting the maximum speed at which the drive runs

And how is that accomplished exactly?

By setting a lower speed in the driver software, but I don't know whether it's possible in DOS/Win3.11, so you may need a third-party utility. Google gives a lot of hits on the topic, the question isn't exactly new...

Apparently the TEAC driver lets you.
Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?

I've found 16X readers gave a pretty good compromise between speed and noise for DOS era usage. As others have said before, if you go with a modernish drive, make sure it has CD audio out. Sometimes the connector is there but it's marked as "not connected" or something like that.

There was also a TSR for DOS, which did let you set the speed of the CD-ROM drive.
It was for ATAPI drives and was simply named "CDSPEED".