If I ever needed to buy an IDE or SCSI drive.

Pioneer slot in CD/DVD.
Yamaha CD-R/DVD-R(+R RW etc).
Plextor.

When it comes to new modern drives (without audio connectors) I like Samsung.

This Pioneer drive fell from my "desk" only a few days ago, it missed my foot by an inch. You can see some damage in the upper left corner of the drive. Back in 1996 I managed to do the same thing with my Mitsumi 4x drive, while it still worked the mechanical parts became alot more noisy. The Pioneer drive dosn't seem to mind the mistreatment at all though, it still works flawlessly.

Zup wrote:

As a bonus, those drives will surely be quiet... because I've never seen a 16x or faster drive with play buttons.

I have several.

Interesting points being made, thanks for the tips.

My current DOS system uses an IDE 16x CD ROM drive. It of course has internal audio out connector to play redbook audio CD in pure DOS, so 16x CD ROM drive is a safe bet, but I wonder if I can do better.

My approach is always period overkill instead of period correct, so I'm always interested to use fast DVD drive for a DOS-based Pentium II system. But of course, the said drive must be able to physically channel redbook audio to the sound card, because, unlike Windows XP, DOS cannot do that in software.

Zup wrote:

A long time ago, I had a CD drive with volume control and some buttons on the panel (Play/Pause, Next, Previous and Stop). I guess every drive with those buttons will surely have internal audio output.

As a bonus, those drives will surely be quiet... because I've never seen a 16x or faster drive with play buttons.

Like this:

I think all my pure cd drives have volume and play buttons and half of my dvd drives have volume but no play buttons. Blu ray drives have neither.

TBH I've never seen an IDE optical drive without the 4-pin redbook audio connector, but who's questioning their existence? I know for a fact that SATA drives don't have it and neither do the SATA-to-IDE adapters, so going for a native IDE optical drive is your best bet if you find redbook audio important.

As far as my opinion on certain brands goes: No-name ones should be avoided, I had a couple no-name/generic DVD-ROM drives from the early-2000s and none of them worked properly. Wearnes is one bad brand because their drives are known for not being able to read burnt CDs (which can be important in some cases), I have an 8x Wearnes CD-ROM drive and it could never read CD-Rs nor CD-RWs even when it still worked (Compaq used Wearnes drives quite often). The only major brand I've had issues with was HL-DT-ST which typically had trouble burning discs, but since this is about DOS PCs which won't be doing any burning, you should be OK with their drives.

Warlord wrote:

The drives that I have had the worst luck with and seen the most failures from are Sony drives and this is multiple occasions. That being said I don't even think that sony and for that matter a lot of other companies manufactured their own drives, they only did firmware and stickers.

Haven't had problems with Sony drives either, then again the quality of their products in general have gone downhill ever since they cut corners by relying on average Chinese manufacturers like everybody else, so it's possible that the good Sony drives predate this generation (the newest one I have is from 2006).

creepingnet wrote:

Anything 8086/80186/80188/8088 should not have a CD-ROM, not like it's really all that useful, and if I want to listen to tunes with the 8088, spinning some LPs on the turntable makes more sense anyway for a more authentic early 80's experience.

There's also listening to some good ol' fashioned cassettes on a cassette deck/boombox. 😎

Easy, not sure ... If you have a chance to test the CD drive before, you could check the following points :

- check sound level (of mechanism) when drive is working
- check that the motor mechanism does not use rubber band
- check if drive can read re-writable CD
- check with 2 or 3 different scratched CD to see if drive is able to read correctly