From around 1999? Anything Pioneer made would fit the bill.

Or a newer model with software to slow down CD access. Frankly that's ideal as there are games which will screw up cutscenes with anything over 4 or 8x. Wing commander 3 among them!

I never did any extensive testing regarding how loud a CDROM drive can become.
Generally I tend to stick with optical drives made in the 2k's for later systems and go for DVD drives from the upper Coppermines.

I recently thought about this, does anyone happen to know if an old CDROM writer could be more silent?
After all, they would need a stable spinning disk in order to prevent errors in writing disks, right? Perhaps CDR drives are build more resiliently and thus are more silent?

I use the newest/fastest working drive I can find. I don't care about loud CD/DVD drives when I have good speakers 😀

Tetrium wrote:

I never did any extensive testing regarding how loud a CDROM drive can become. Generally I tend to stick with optical drives mad […]
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I never did any extensive testing regarding how loud a CDROM drive can become.
Generally I tend to stick with optical drives made in the 2k's for later systems and go for DVD drives from the upper Coppermines.

I recently thought about this, does anyone happen to know if an old CDROM writer could be more silent?
After all, they would need a stable spinning disk in order to prevent errors in writing disks, right? Perhaps CDR drives are build more resiliently and thus are more silent?

In my experience the noise level of the writer has more to do with the quality of the drive than anything else. So, they're basically the same as the readers. 😀

That said, Plextor stuff used to be absolutely top notch, as was some of the old Sony stuff (but I had a bad experience with my first DVD burner which was a Sony). They cost 20-50 percent more than the competition though, so you were really paying for quality (and you actually got it). They didn't necessarily last any longer, but they were really quiet.

Any more, I'm very happy with the 20 dollar Lite On DVD burners I buy. I figure get something similar in PATA and just run it with software that slows the disc down and I'll be golden. Otherwise, nothing needs constant access to disk any more.

SavantStrike wrote:

In my experience the noise level of the writer has more to do with the quality of the drive than anything else. So, they're basically the same as the readers. 😀

But aren't burners supposed to be of higher quality then a contemporary ordinary reader?

Tetrium wrote:

SavantStrike wrote:

In my experience the noise level of the writer has more to do with the quality of the drive than anything else. So, they're basically the same as the readers. 😀

But aren't burners supposed to be of higher quality then a contemporary ordinary reader?

IDK. In my experience they really aren't, it's just people don't usually buy nice readers, they buy generic el-cheapo readers. If you buy a nice name brand reader, it's going to be remarkably similar to an equivalent burner from the same manufacturer, just that the burner will have more elaborate features.

My current favorite is an external Fantom Drives SCSI DVD RAM drive that I picked up from ebay a couple years back for $20. Just try finding even a bare drive for that now.

The slower they spin the quieter they are. My experience so far:

2x - silent
4x - just about silent
8x - a slight hum?
12x - ?
16x - ?
24x - ?
32x - intolerably noisy (for peaceful gaming)

Can anyone fill in my blanks or perform a more accurate acoustic measurement?? 😀

On the quieter spinning drives, the sound of the head seeking becomes more noticable. My 2x/4x are Creative/Panasonic/Matsushita which seem to have quite loud seek noises. I once had 8x NEC which had quiet, bubbly sounding seeks.

4x is fast enough for Wing Commander 3/4 and most DOS games. Maybe Windows games need something a little faster.

I found 20x to be audible, but not that annoying.
The couple 40x 50x (when 50x was top notch...remember the CDROM ?x speed race that ran in the latter part of the 90s?) I tried made the table rock and sounded more like a rocket about to lift off! 😜
That's why I prefer a more recent unit and am kinda surprised to hear about a 2005 reader being very noisy.

Though on the subject of noise, noise is something personal. What is "silent enough" for one person may be torture for another.

Same with harddrives. Some people curse about every single sound a harddrive makes, but I don't mind the grinding noise a drive makes when doing reads/writes at all (also easy as I can hear the drive is actually working). It's the whining constant noise that are torture to me.

I also noticed some readers tend to spin up a drive, then stop spinning the disk for a little while while others go full throttle all the time.

...maybe I should go try out some of those software thingies for reducing the spindle speed of optical drives.

Anyone happen to have a comprehensive list? I dunno if some readers work with all of those programs or not.

emote wrote:

The slower they spin the quieter they are. My experience so far: […]
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The slower they spin the quieter they are. My experience so far:

2x - silent
4x - just about silent
8x - a slight hum?
12x - ?
16x - ?
24x - ?
32x - intolerably noisy (for peaceful gaming)

Can anyone fill in my blanks or perform a more accurate acoustic measurement?? 😀

On the quieter spinning drives, the sound of the head seeking becomes more noticable. My 2x/4x are Creative/Panasonic/Matsushita which seem to have quite loud seek noises. I once had 8x NEC which had quiet, bubbly sounding seeks.

4x is fast enough for Wing Commander 3/4 and most DOS games. Maybe Windows games need something a little faster.

I had a 32x memorex drive that was probably my favorite non-DVD drive of all time. I also had a 16x Pioneer DVD drive which was my favorite drive of all time. It could make some noise at full rev, but not horrible.

None of them are even close to silent at high speed. The only way to get a silent drive that I can think of is through software to slow it down. That said, that Pioneer had the least offensive whine.

back in the days, I used only japanese brands for optical drives, only because the korean stuff (like LG) were unrefined and you got that noise issue
I have a toshiba XM-6502B 40x drive that worked great... it only recently died from old age... the tray doesn't want to eject anymore, so it's probably a broken belt or something like that... I don't care to take it apart... I stuffed the creative DXR2 drive in there in its place.... it works as 20x in CD mode and it's obviously quieter than the toshiba.... but neither one of those drives were loud enough to be annoying... the DXR2 drive was made by panasonic FYI

I was always a fan of panasonic drives because they were well built and quiet... they don't excel in anything, but they worked great at least

I haven't cared to use anything sony since the early 90s because of crappy lasers... they just sucked at reading bad discs and fail easily once you abused it with bad discs
I thought those optiarc drives were good until I made a burn with one of them... the burn sucked so much that even my trusty pioneer burner can't really read it well... I looked at the disc and you can barely see it even was burned.... I ended up copying the contents and reburning it

bottom line is though, if you go past 40x, you have severe noise and vibration issues... 40x is pushing it too... you must get a good brand to get acceptable noise levels... the toshiba was acceptable to me, but I've seen a panasonic 40x in a compaq, omg it was so noisy!

I find old Lite-on 48x drives c. 2000-2002 to be the noisiest of the lot. Sony, Pioneer, Aopen tend to be pretty silent even at 40-48x. I even have one 52x drive (which I forgot the make of) which is damn near silent. So, I think speed is half the factor in quietness, the other half is the drives build quality and when we're talking about old used hardware, condition as well.

Got a Plextor DVD-R, model 750-A in my main desktop. I used to have an old Pioneer DVD-ROM running in it as a secondary disc drive, but it died

OP, have a read of this: Re: Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?
Its possible to throttle the CDROM drive speed by passing a paramter to the DOS driver.

Personally, I'm using a Sony CDU-33A in my 386, it uses the proprietary 34-pin header off my Sound Blaster Pro. Pretty quiet although for some games that thrash the CD drive a bit like Rebel Assault it can be quite slow. The game plays a lot smoother on faster CD-ROM drives.

Wow, tons of great answers here. Yeah, the LiteOn drive I'm using was a bottom of the barrel generic beige model that I used on the first computer I ever built back in '05. I believe it was the cheapest model on Newegg that had half decent reviews, so I got it. Works, but it definitely lacks refinement.

Interestingly, while I would have guessed that the main culprit of the noise is the speed, the CD-ROM drive that I originally used was a Mitsumi 40x built in 1999. It was quiet to the point that I really didn't even notice is was running. Only problem is, it was horribly unreliable, some discs in perfect condition wouldn't read at all, others that were scratched up would be fine... but sometimes in the middle of an install it would just stop responding and come up with a blue screen media reading error. Back then I had access to large swaths of old CD drives, and all the other Mitsumis I came across were entirely dead. So, I just went with the most reliable solution.

My guess is it's some sort of internal balancing issue at work, and the cheaper drives just don't deliver.

I may try to throttle the CD speed as suggested, but only if my efforts to find a quiet high quality drive fail me. Fast read times are enjoyable.

ahh... the CDU-33A... oldie but goodie... I still have one sitting here, but it's useless to me because I've moved on to an AWE32, and mine doesn't have the controller for it unlike the early ones... still is 2x and sucks down CPU like crazy though

My theory is that the old burners are better balanced than many of their reader counterparts, and "may" be more silent as a result. This is only my "juuust had my first sip of coffee" theory so it may be half baked 😜

emote wrote:

The slower they spin the quieter they are. My experience so far: […]
Show full quote

The slower they spin the quieter they are. My experience so far:

2x - silent
4x - just about silent
8x - a slight hum?
12x - ?
16x - ?
24x - ?
32x - intolerably noisy (for peaceful gaming)

Can anyone fill in my blanks or perform a more accurate acoustic measurement?? 😀

On the quieter spinning drives, the sound of the head seeking becomes more noticable. My 2x/4x are Creative/Panasonic/Matsushita which seem to have quite loud seek noises. I once had 8x NEC which had quiet, bubbly sounding seeks.

4x is fast enough for Wing Commander 3/4 and most DOS games. Maybe Windows games need something a little faster.

I have an oddball 3X drive around here somewhere. It was fairly quiet from what I remember.

I have a fairly recent Samsung 22x DVDRW in my SS7 machine. I use that TEAC dos driver to slow it down (there is a thread on VOGONS with more details).