I always find CD-Rs to work more reliably if burned at the lowest possible speed. With this, even my oldest single speed drive can read them without any failures yet.

There are, however, some drives which simply don't like such discs and will throw a fit regardless of what you try to do.

It would not hurt, to clean the lens too.

Any IDE optical disc drive ought to work just fine – the only problem is that the fastest ones will make a lot more noise. Speed sensitive games are unlikely to be affected much by a faster disc drive.

Thanks, all! So in order to avoid the noise, I will try CDBeQuiet and other experiments. It is difficult to keep a retro PC authentic as possible. I found very few quad speeds on ebay as of late. As parts fail, I will probably have to just use dosbox.

I like using old CDR drives.
I have a 6x/2x and an 8x/2x CDR drive that work well in a 486 -- not for burning, but they seem to read CDR's better than plain readers of the same speed. Nice and quiet too.