Fast CDRom drives sound like that, if you don't want that, any <10x drive should be fine. I like Teac drives best personally, but other good brands (Toshiba, NEC, Plextor, LG, LiteOn, that sort of stuff) should be fine too.

As for the popups - that's software, not hardware. Disable the autorun functionality.

I would create ISO of game, and use Daemon Tools to mount it. Much quieter.
Personally I'm using Daemon Tools 3.47 under Windows 98 (Pentium !!! 450)

I prefer to load from the original discs for as authentic an experience as possible

after much scouring of ebay I have found a couple of options

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Toshiba-Samsung-SH … Z8AAOSwFZtbPcuF
( I found an article from 1999 on Arstechnica saying Toshiba were the quietest but this drive is still 52x)

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sony-CRX160E-Beige … JQAAOSwBkFau041
This is a 32x drive I believe so should be significantly quieter?

I've also tried Nero drivespeed and it doesn't seem to actually do anything to the speed of my drive...

Thanks for your help 😀

ElDavo wrote:

... This is a 32x drive I believe so should be significantly quieter?

Most likely not. I would personally recommend something like this "Mitsubishi" (actually Matsushita) 12x or this NEC 8x unit. Both are very quiet in my experience.

I did stick mostly with cd burners back in the day. First one was MItsumi CR-2801 and after that I did stick with plextor cd drives. In my experience cd burners were also more reliable when it came to reading CDs. I still have that old Mitsumi burner in my K6-III+ retro pc and it works fine.

SW-SSG wrote:

ElDavo wrote:

... This is a 32x drive I believe so should be significantly quieter?

Most likely not. I would personally recommend something like this "Mitsubishi" (actually Matsushita) 12x or this NEC 8x unit. Both are very quiet in my experience.

The CD drive that came with the pc was a compaq 8 or 10x drive and when playing worms pinball it would stop the game for about 1.5 seconds to load a song, which is always fun in a pinball game.
Do you think that is more likely to be a problem with that drive or the drive speed in general?

If speed is the issue, CDBremse may be the answer... Google for file

get something that does not suffer from ejectile dysfunction

As far as a tank that's at least not intolerably slow, the (Lucky Goldstar!) GCD-R580-B, an 8x IDE drive that is just a tank and isn't particularly noisy. If it doesn't work, check your CONFIG.SYS or Device Manager, because it's not broken, you've just configured something wrong.

You could try a DVD-RW from CEX - a single layer (probably not the fastest) is 75p - the p&p will be more!

PS. the faster Sony models based on Liteon tend to drop a speed down unless you turbo them (5 seconds press on the button) The 52X generally deturbo to 40x - the 32x does not have a turbo mode

There is a utility called "CDBeQuiet!"

http://cdbq.dosforum.de/

It might help. There is even a topic about it here in vogons:

Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?

Slower CD-ROM drives tend to have severe compatibility issues with CD-R/RW media.

I was using Nero Drivespeed ( I think that's what it was called) and it just seemed like the CD drive was ignoring it maybe this drive cant have it's speed changed?

I have ordered 2 comically cheap drives from CEX, I always forget they exist :p both of fairly low speeds and I will have to test them when they arrive. Looking forward to opening up my pc for more tinkering 😁 also probably gonna take out the unnecessary ram as it just seems to slow down boot times and I really don't think my quest to complete all the Tomb raiders is gonna need 384mb of ram. 😀

Thanks again for the help everyone. I swear this is the most helpful forum I have ever seen 😁

In my experience a 24x speed was already a lot quieter than a 40x speed. 52x speeds CDROM drives sound like they are about to go to warp 🤣.
Generally speaking, the slower the CDROM drive, the more quiet it will be.

Another thing you could try is to use a DVD drive. CDROM burners often were more quiet as they had slower stock rotation speed when reading to begin with.

Please keep in mind that the much slower speed-rated CDROM drives may have trouble reading burned disks (generally 8x and lower, but this is not set in stone and more a rule of thumb).

The quest for quiet continues...

I've been away this weekend but came back today to find one of the optical drives I ordered from CEX has arrived it's the 75p single layer DvD drive (Beige)

Nero DriveSpeed actually recognises different speeds with this one and lets me run it between 1x and 48x running at 8x playing games seems to work well 😀

SW-SSG wrote:

ElDavo wrote:

... This is a 32x drive I believe so should be significantly quieter?

Most likely not. I would personally recommend something like this "Mitsubishi" (actually Matsushita) 12x or this NEC 8x unit. Both are very quiet in my experience.

That NEC drive mentioned is great - nice and quiet and handles burnt CDs which can be a problem with the earlier drives.

The 75p drive I took a gamble on turned out to be a NEC drive...just in the wrong colour
running it at 8 or 10x is quieter than the fans inside 😀

My plextor plexwriter 24/10/40a is probable the most quiet cd drive I have.

Its a Shame we don't have a list of quite optical drives with makes and models like we do with sound blaster cards. EG what version of sound blaster 16 has the hanging note bug, if the card produce a lot of noise and what model version use a real OPL-3 chip and so on. I know you can emulate using daemon347 and software like TEAC CD driver. But like a lot of people just I want to play games using a CD/DVD drive with out the hassle. Daemon requires Windows Installer 2.0 for it to work + USB Drivers to be installed and TEAC CD driver can be flakey. However If we document all the makes and models for CD/DVD Drives then we would know what ones are the quietest drives, most reliable and ones that can read burnt disks.