Not the most exciting purchase, but I just got a new old stock HP cd12 CD-RW.
I was using a Gateway-branded HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8160B that I'd pulled from a non-working computer my friend had sitting in their garage. I mainly bought this replacement specifically to get a slower read speed to get quieter operation when spinning up discs (the Gateway drive was very loud with a read speed of 42x I believe). While it is much quieter in operation, the tray mechanism is noisy and grindy, and I've not been able to remedy it with white lithium grease (I think it's just plastic-on-plastic sound of a cheaper-make drive rather than the gearing or the sound of imminent failure). Still, it's quieter when reading discs, so that's the important thing.
Oddly enough, the drive itself does not match the packaging, which isn't terrible since it matches my floppy emulator, but I was kind of looking forward to the drive having the packaging's beige 90s aesthetic.