Under DOS there is a utility called CDBQ and with this you set the drive to 4x speed. Then it doesn't spin up and down anymore...

More info here: Re: Looking for a quite Cd Rom drive

Under Windows there are likely similar utilities...

I'm also looking for a CD-Drive to use in a 486 machine that has an option to run either a 486SX-25, or 5x86-133 (dual CPU config, selectable with a jumper). I've got a Creative 4x CD-ROM, and ordered a 32x SCSI Plextor drive. Plus I have an option to buy a 2x, 4x, 8x, 12x etc. And at last, a 2x write/6x read HP drive is available for sale somewhere nearby. What should I stick to looking for CD-RW discs compatibility and smooth CD-Audio?

Will a SCSI drive provide anything that IDE one wouldn't provide?

CD-RW discs generally can only be read in CD-RW drives. (Really, they're a pain in the neck and I find their capacity to be re-writable to be greatly overstated. But perhaps that is just my experience.)

SCSI will probably cause more problems than it could possibly solve.

The aforementioned utility will probably resolve all the speed problems you might encounter.

What's this motherboard with a jumper-selectable CPU?

I don't remember any major problems with CD-RW, I burn them with my laptop's DVD-RW drive and read with my main retro-PC Plextor PX-130A DVD drive. Maybe I should just forget about authenticity and buy myself another Plextor DVD to use with a 486 to retain CD-RW compatibility.

That's the motherboard of a slim desktop Samsung Deskmaster 486S/25Q. It's name should be Samsung SD925 rev 1.1, if I'm not mistaken.

photo

It has a 486SX-25 soldered in, and a 169-pin Socket 1, along with a jumper to switch between built-in and Socket 1 CPUs. That eliminates the actual need of 169-pin CPUs, any 168 or 169 pin with 5 volt support would do it. Thus I bought myself a Kingston Turbochip, that is actually an Am5x86-133 adapted to a Socket 1, with a fan powered right from socket.

You could try a tool like SPINDOWN to prevent the CD-ROM from spinning down to early. Some CD-ROM device drivers may also have such an option.
Additionally you could try to set the CD-ROM speed to 1x since audio is played at this speed. But I would only do this if no significant amount of data is read. CDBQ was mentioned, I think there are several tools for Windows to achieve this.

You won't get rid of the short pause totally. What you could do is to look for a drive which has a low seek time. The problem is that most published benchmark will show you only the access time which is influenced by the rotation speed, and audio is played at 1x speed. Still for drives with the same nominal speed access times should be comparable. More modern drivers probably lower seek times then than earlier ones.

So I'd probably look for a drive with at least 24x speed and set speed and spindown time like suggested.