Some of these drives had IR remote control, which may be deemed as "premium". But I think it's just outgoing trend, which applies to old Plextor drives even more. There's also common misconception that some old ISA sound cards and 3DO card can work only with Creative drives.

Creative made “multimedia starter kits” in early-mid 90 and such “dvd kits” in late 90. For some people its a nostalgia brand and a common Creative brand popularity gives price-rising.

Yep, if you put a Creative logo on a turd, some people would pay a premium for it.

Most of those drives are bog-standard ATAPI CD-Rom drives made by the likes of Matsushita and LG. Nothing wrong with them, but absolutely no added technical value over the same drive without the Creative logo.

The IR-control things are nice though, as are some of the really early non-ATAPI drives (though there again, they're just rebranded Panasonic/Matsushita drives), and Creative did make one very special external drive/sound card, the CT2755 EasyCD, with most of the analog features of the (SB16) sound card in the external drive - but most of the stuff people are over-paying for is just relabeled ATAPI.

Correct, all that extra $$$ is just the Creative logo basically. There's one special case I can think about, which is the 3DO Blaster that requires a specific model of drive. But even then, you can use the non-Creative equivalent (from Panasonic I believe) and who even has a 3DO Blaster anyway?

I find early drives useful (around 4x - 8x) because they're almost noiseless and do not spin up and down all the time when streaming content from the CD so they're ideal to run games from that period. They're also much more reliable than later stuff in my experience. But I wouldn't pay a single cent more for one just because of the Creative label.

It's just a trend. It'll die down after awhile. What most of those people don't know is those Creative drives often are just some other drive rebranded.

I hardly even use Optical drives anymore myself. I just use SHSUCDHD and SHSUCDX together with ISO files most of the time. I only really use CD's for installing Operating Systems anymore.

The only vintage Creative Labs product worth paying good money for is the Sound Blaster 2 Audigy ZS, which is the pinnacle of their soundcards that work with Windows XP. Every other piece of hardware they have branded - with the exception of one particular model of excellent stereo speakers they designed that nobody buys because they are crazy expensive - is a questionable product.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-07-26, 20:05:

The only vintage Creative Labs product worth paying good money for is the Sound Blaster 2 Audigy ZS, which is the pinnacle of their soundcards that work with Windows XP. Every other piece of hardware they have branded - with the exception of one particular model of excellent stereo speakers they designed that nobody buys because they are crazy expensive - is a questionable product.

I think you meant to point out that the 2 zs was the last one to work with 9x/ME most of their cards work with xp. unsure about new stuff. I speak of retro stuff.

Actually Audigy 4 Pro is the last one for 9x, although it's just 2 ZS Platinum with better DAC. But hey, every card after original Audigy is just added bells and whistles, unless you're into 6.1/7.1 surround sound.

That's what I figured regarding the CD drives, thanks for clarifying. Back in the day I was all about the TDK VeloCD 52x CD-RW, and is the only drive I ever went into Best Buy and paid retail for. At the time it was second to none for ripping audio, and when I was ripping and burning PSX games, I had the best luck with that drive by far. Now when I need a CD drive for another build I just look to see what's cheap on fleabay. Plenty of NOS drives around the $20 mark.