The plextor would be the only choice for me. I have about 14 of them in various speeds, the 4012 is the best one I have but that's a bit new for you. The 8/4/32 is a fine drive for the time. Yamaha's are OK but tend to have issues with the tray mechanism, everything else is pretty much junk in my experience. YMMV. Avoid Creative and HP drives, they are the worst.

Another issue you will face is that most modern fast CDR blank disks will not burn proper in an older 4x or 8x CD burner. You need to look for something with a max of 16x. My fav old media was from Imation, Kodak and Maxell, have 100's of disks burned in late 90's that still read like new on those media and rarely had a coaster.

My first burner was a full retail Ricoh MP7040A (IDE) in the late 90s. Generally worked quite well, successfully burned a couple of hundred discs - still have a lot of them, but haven't checked for bit rot. In fact, I sold it as a boxed working unit about 2 years ago. In the early 00s I switched to a SCSI Plextor writer, as it had such a good reputation, and had no problems there either.

Seems Plextor gets mentioned here a lot and also on a lot of old forum threads. Looks like they had some sort of Holy Grail of CD Burning status back then 😀 Haven't seen anyone complaining about their Plextor drives, and plenty of grieviances about HP, Phillips and Creative..

Dave Farquhar wrote:

You are correct, SCSI CD burners used a lot less CPU than IDE burners of the late 90s, so they were less prone to make coasters. I had an HP CD-Writer Plus 9110i at work in 1999 and its success rate burning discs wasn't much higher than 50% in the 366 MHz Pentium II that I had. The Sony SCSI drive that I had at home was much more reliable (working over 90% of the time) even though all I had was a Pentium-233. I don't know anymore if that HP drive was the first IDE CD-R or not, but early IDE burners weren't great, especially in older systems.

My first burner was a Smart&Friendly SCSI model. Don't recall coasters being a thing with it; then again, when it glitched out and I changed it to an LG IDE burner, I also don't recall a noticeable amount of coasters. The CPU was a 475MHz K6-II, though.

I happen to be sitting in front of my storage bin of unused optical drives. I found 2 CDR/RW drives made in the 1990s. Both are from HP machines. I'll also include text on the labels that might show up in an eBay/etc search:

• HP C4410-56000 May 1999 "CD-Writer Plus 7500 series" "2X/2X/24X IDE CD-Recordable/ReWritable Drive" "Product Exchange HP C4410-60001/69001" - Don't know if I ever tested this. Color is beige with some blue on the eject button and nearby text.
  
  Sony CRX100E September 1998 - "Hewlett Packard" "4X/2X/24X Max IDE CD-Recordable/ReWritable(CD-R/RW)" "Part Number:D4398-60021" "HP Revision B" - "Sony" "CD-R/RW DRIVE UNIT" "VERSION BC" "4-900-401-02" - This drive still worked last time I burned discs with it, but that was like 15 years ago. I do have a note on the drive saying it "Reads Poorly" so maybe mine is just dirty but this could also mean it's picky about disc quality. This version is gray, not beige, because the machine it came from is gray.

Now off on tangents:
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Most drives from the 1990s are going to be picky about disc quality, so most cheap modern CDR discs tend to be unreadable in them. On various drives where I've had that problem, they've been happy to read Taiyo Yuden J-CDR-WPP-SK discs that I bought in 2015 (their Japanese plant has since closed, new TY discs are made elsewhere). I have *not* tried burning them with an old drive though, I'm just talking about readability.
I've also had good luck with some semi-old Sony discs that I got at a thrift store. If you go in thrifts, check the blank CDRs for anything that looks promising. Anything that's labelled "Made in Japan" is probably made by a good OEM. Anything that's old (650MB or low burning speeds) is probably good quality also, assuming they weren't stored badly over the years.

Besides the issue of disc quality, there's a 2nd issue if you add "retro burning" into it.
Burners have a burn strategy/calibration in their firmware that responds to the ID code of the blank media. An old firmware won't recognize newer ID codes and will fall back on a generic strategy. This can cause much higher error rates in the burn (some software can scan for this). These are correctable errors (at read time) but of course the less you have, the better.

Taiyo Yuden was all about stability with their product line, and their customers ordered from them expecting everything to keep working consistently. So it's possible that they managed to make their newer discs compatible with older burn strategies (reusing the old ID codes), but I'm not sure.
I *think* that back when I ordered my 2015 TY discs, I had found some info that their ID code was supported by my Plextor PX-W 12/10/32S from ~2001. But I'm not sure on that memory and I've never tried burning them in it.

The old cdfreaks.com forum had lots of arcane knowledge about disc burning (and quality testing) from people who were obsessed with it. That forum is now branded as myce.com. I think the old forum threads are still buried there underneath all the modern nonsense. Probably easier to navigate using an external search "site:myce.com".

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Plextor didn't get many complaints, but I believe one reason is because they weren't exposed to the entire market.
Plextor didn't start making IDE/ATA drives until about 2000-01, after the "BurnProof" feature was added. In the years when ATA was more likely to produce coasters, Plextor didn't offer drives for that interface.
Their commitment to SCSI also meant they were typically used by more knowledgeable users and those who spent more on PC hardware and probably had a good setup.
All this probably helped their reputation independent of the quality of their drives (which was also certainly good).

My first CDR was a cheap Hi-Val on a cramped, overheating K6 system running Windows 9x that barely ever made any good discs. Plextor didn't have to worry about getting my business. 😀

When I bought a Plextor, I paired it with a 2nd-hand HP SCSI workstation at the opposite end of the spectrum in quality. You could use that PC for drum practice and I still doubt it would make a coaster.

Plextor drives were designed and built for enthusiasts and professionals. I remember seeing them mentioned in articles and advertisements geared around recording studios, for generating demos and pre-releases, etc. They were often in CD towers with like 4 or 8 drives for quick off-the-cuff duplication. They always had the high-end features like Burnproof, smooth tray loading mechanisms, self-balancing disc spindle and clamp mechanisms, and so on. A little pricier than your BenQ and LG drives, but a significant step up in quality.

I have a Plextor Premium CD-RW that I bought new, and still use in an external USB enclosure for ripping audio CDs to this day. It has never been retired for any length of time, though it did cease to be my "main" drive when CD distribution gave way to DVD and eventually BD. Aside from being in need of a new rubber band for the tray loading motor, it works just as well today as it always has.

With a few exceptions, Plextor models were always reliable and high quality. The later years, in the DVD-burning era, they started to slide downhill to compete more with the commodity brands. Even then, their drives were still pretty decent. I have a few DVD burners from that era -- a Toshiba, an LG, and a late-model Plextor. The LG practically tosses the disc at you when opening the tray. The Toshiba's OK but definitely feels built to a price. The Plextor has absolutely been cost-optimized, but it still opens so smoothly and just feels ... light, yet built with care.

They finally sold off to another company that basically kept the Plextor name, but sold rebadged drives by... was it LiteOn? I don't remember for sure. I stopped paying attention to them then. I can't vouch for anything after that point. AFAIK, Plextor-proper never made a BD drive, but "Plextor" (with quotes) did.

Speaking of cult classic vendors, I also have one of those fancy Yamaha burners that had DiscT@2 support. They were awesome drives, plagued with a loading mechanism flaw that caused a lot of them to fail out of the box. I had one bum one that I returned, and got one good one. Barely used it though. I intended that to be my primary audio CD burner, since it had some conservative writing algorithms to make CD-Rs more readable in everyday players. Doesn't much matter these days, as optical disc technology got good enough that even $30 special DVD players are pretty much designed to be able to read a slice of toast now. Or, well, I guess they were ten years ago when optical discs were still a thing...

Can vouch for both Taiyo Yuden from before they sold out, best discs hands down. Verbatim also made quality ones which I still have a cake or two of.

Plextor DVD drives definitely suffered in quality, I have a few and sometimes they won't read retail discs (particularly ones with SecuROM), and my Lite-On drives are much better for that. I use ASUS BD drives these days, they support some of the features that Plextor's had like reading data discs in audio mode with C2 error correction. I still would love to have a Premium or Premium 2, they are still obnoxiously expensive when they turn up. Afaik they were the only CDRW's that could burn toplogy based protections like SecuROM due to the Varirec technology. The plextor's now are rebadged Lite-On or BenQ drives, avoid.

I have a CRW-F1 Yamaha, thankfully the mechanism doesn't have any issues at this time, still though it's an odd drive but the disc T@2 feature is neat, if gimmicky.

Ah..."T@2". I once bought a girlfriend a Yamaha burner with that feature (it uses some of the leftover inner tracks to create a label). I think it was used once just to see if it worked, and then never again. I think by this time the price of CD-RW drives had dropped enough that crap brands like Lite-on, BenQ and Samsung started flooding the market, and pushed out a lot of the old guard (Japanese brands mostly). I remember that Yamaha drive with the T@2 feature didn't seem as solid as my older 6x4x16 drive. Probably from cost cutting to compete with the junk brands.
Somehow Pioneer managed to stick around and not cut quality too much. I remember using Pioneer DVD and DVD-RW drives for quite a few years.

I remember thinking it was a shame that T@2 came out around the time where dyes were starting to get lighter. Before long, the discs were so light you could hardly distinguish the written portion of a CD-R, which makes it pretty useless when you're trying to etch images into the medium.

The LG CD/DVD/BD/HD-DVD drive that I have supports LightScribe instead, which is a neat (but also gimmicky) feature -- for those not familiar, it makes laser-etched labels on the top surface of specially coated discs. But, the discs weren't as easy to find, it took multiple burns to get the contrast deep enough, it took forever, and still only had the image quality of a typical office photocopier. Oh well. Viva la Sharpie, I guess. 😁

For the curious, I went with the Plextor Plexwriter 8/4/32a. Picked it up for 12 EUR, which is a nice price. It reads newer and older burned CD's and CD-RWs like a champion and my first attempt at burning (ImgBurn on Win95) went perfect. No coasters, yet! 😀

I set out to get something from the 90s for this build, but my Plextor was manufactured in 2000. However, the unit was first produced in 1999, so technically it's still 90's technology. So, good enough for me 😀 Here's a pic I found that shows a Plexwriter from October 1999.

I have a PlexWriter 12/10/32S.
After a long time I wanted to start it again, but both LEDs were blinking orange.
Still the burner was recognized by the SCSI controller, but I was unable to access media.
Then I updated the Firmware and it worked again 😀

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but make sure you get one with a buffer, or you will regret it.

A lot of the early budget 4x drives didn't. I had a early AOpen drive in 98-99 and it had this drawback...

Great choice, for period correct it should be a fantastic drive.

Plextor were the ultimate for burning.

While digging thru my boxes I found my original Plexwriter 8/20 (PX-R820Ti) tonite while looking for an early model floppy drive, thought I had given it away but there it was. After cleaning it works just like it did back in the day. One thing ! I also had to clean the connector pins and jumper pins with 99% alc before it was fully recognized. Texel made most Plexter drives and did a great job !

Plextor, HP, Yamaha, and Teac drives were what I used back in the early SCSI burning days. Liteon, Pioneere ,Plextor, Sony,and Yamaha were popular in the IDE era.

I think all HP branded drives were actually Sonys. At least some of them were.