Regrettably, I think your requirements are a bit impossible. Fast drives won't be quiet, and slowdown utilities won't work in DOS.

Are you referring to older drives from the 90's, or buying one brand new?

I'm planning on getting some older drives. I've used upto 8X (when I was using it more than 10 years ago.) speed but not gone further. I've seen some drives on ebay with speeds of 12X, 16X, and 24X. I do hope these are CAV-mode drives, which in turn should be quiet too. But I'm not sure of the 24X speed and above and I'm not sure upto what speeds pure CAV drives were made.

I've seen people discussing about SCSI drives, but not sure of the IDE ones. I'm planning to get the IDE ones.

Other than Plextor, there were few brand name CDROM drives back then. Well they all had a "brand" of course, but no models became sought after classics other than Plextor. For that reason, it's difficult to recommend a specific model.

I do know most of the earliest drives were CLV, and 2x 4x 8x type drives also had difficulty reading some CDR or CDRW media, which makes a CD Writer more desirable (whether you write or not) just because they can read those discs. Later drives could be either CAV or CLV, but were faster, making them louder.

You may want to visit the experts at http://club.cdfreaks.com. I'm sure somebody there can rattle off some choices for you to consider.

I use a Plextor Premium capped at 20x CLV - fast and quiet. The Plextor software lets you choose the maximum speed and writes it to flash, so you don't need slowdown utils. The bad thing is, this drives are still expensive.

So, I guess, a drive below 24X speed would do. I'll keep an eye on the Plextor drives too. Thanks!