I had both. If I remember right I had them running under the a generic DOS driver. But they were nothing special - a lot of problems with them, and both eventually died. I think they were made by Gold Star (not a good brand).

I thought they were actually Sony drives?

The nice thing about them is that they interface with certain sound cards, like the Pro Sonic 16, but this sounds like an age/build quality problem. (Alternatively, double-check the master/slave jumpers.)

The Creative drives are rebranded (or OEM?) Pansonic/Matsushita drives. At least the double speed drive.

The drivers could be modded to work either way. I believe I needed a HEX editor to get the drivers to work on the other drive 😀

That is I had the Matsuhita drive and the German computer magazines often had driver updates but it was always for the Creative drive. So I had to hex edit the driver to make it work 😀

I had a Sound Blaster 16 which had a CD Rom port and it worked well.

Panasonic, of course! Not Sony. My mistake.

the 3x, 4x and faster drives were made by other companies
the 2x drives supplied with their kits were either sony CDU-33A or panasonic CR-563B .... mostly panasonic came with the kits though
the 4x and faster drives were all IDE... any driver, including the generic OAK driver that comes with win9x should work... creative did release their own IDE drivers too

If your Creative quad speed drive is CR-574 then try driver LM572IDE.SYS.

http://www.computercraft.com/cd_drivers/LM572IDE.SYS

The 4X I had was definitely made by Gold Star.....it has a GCD model number and came up as Gold Star....

I believe it...
many IDE drives sold by creative was made by various different companies, with varying quality... best ones always seems to be the panasonic or nec, hands down

google SBIDE20.EXE
first result should be with creative's website.... download that... that driver is designed to work with all creative's IDE drives and should work with zero issues