I suppose LG and Pioneer would be at the top, with Lite-On towards the bottom.

Really, there's no reason you couldn't just stick a brand-new IDE DVD+RW drive in your 486. It might get noisy when it spins up, but there are ways to suppress that if it annoys you.

Ok thanks for the suggestions. I will look for those. It's not really the noise that bothers me though. I just want them to work reliably for longer than 3 months.

Is there a recommended max speed that Dos6.22/Win3.11 can handle? I see a lot 50x readers on Ebay for cheap. Would those work?

Yeah, no such thing as "too fast", hardware wise.

Literally any IDE CD drive should work. The newer the better as far as reliability and speed are concerned. I second Jorpho's suggestions and would add Mitsumi since the old 16x Mitsumi CD-ROM drive iv had since new and the 2x Goodwill drive both work flawlessly.

Well all my 486 to Pentium III dos machines use mostly latest IDE Lite-on DVD Dual Layer burners. (They were most common.) And i have never looked back. Ok i have few DVD-ROM and CD-Burners also, with different manufactures.

If you get a DVD-RW drive, you can read DVD-RW's in your DOS machine, as long as they are mastered with an ISO9660 filesystem (i.e. not UDF). So that's something!

If you buy a newer drive then make sure it still has the audio connector.
Personally I haven't run into many dead drives so I don't have an opinion of one brand over another.

I have a 486 where i cant get drives faster than ~16x to work. I have only tried like 5-6 drives, so it may be bad luck or incompetence on my part. I used the mscdex from dos 6.22.

I think the problem is in drives, not the speed, you can mash together a 286 and a fast DVD reader with no problems at all.

bbhaag wrote:

Ok thanks for the suggestions. I will look for those. It's not really the noise that bothers me though. I just want them to work reliably for longer than 3 months.

If your system consistently burns through CD drives every three months, then there might be something wrong with your system (overvoltage?).

Is there a recommended max speed that Dos6.22/Win3.11 can handle? I see a lot 50x readers on Ebay for cheap. Would those work?

The limit is in the ATA bus, not the drive itself. Most drives are downwards compatible with slower bus speeds.

I have a Pentium MMX machine that runs MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 and windows 95 in multiboot configuration. I had the problem "Creative CD Player / MS CD player is not playing music CDs" with two different modern DVD drives, so I downgraded it to a CD RW only drive, which solved the problem. I still don't know what the real problem is.

You can try to find a Plextor drive, I had one my dad bought new in 1996 that lasted up to 2012 it was a 2x CD-RW 🤣

I always had real good luck with Teac drives.

What are you using the drive for? playing games, Audio or just installing?
My 486 got a new (or 2nd hand) drive about once a year back in the day but that's settled down now with large hard drives, where you can no-cd games, network, to copy files or entire game install form other pc's. The only thing I haven't found a solution for is games that use CD Audio for music.

That said Plextor was the big name back then, but any IDE drive will be getting on a bit now. I'd get whatever is a good price, faster drives aren't going to help much in a 486, in fact you have to wait for the stupid thing to spin up and down.

I give + for LG, LiteON, Samsung and Sony drives. Never had issues with both DVD and CD drives from those makers.

Most of my DVD drives are so late that they neglect CD sound out, so I tend to just slap a random CD drive from 199X into stuff.
In essense: whatever looks physically workable, test cd sound and speed. Anything PATA should work. What is best? Depends on wehther you want features or proper dating.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I bought a couple of cheap Norcent drives off ebay that the seller claims to be new. Hopefully these last a little longer than the last two. I'm kinda curious about yawetaG mentioning overvoltage. I'm still using the original Liteon psu how would I go about testing for overvoltage?

tayyare wrote:

I have a Pentium MMX machine that runs MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 and windows 95 in multiboot configuration. I had the problem "Creative CD Player / MS CD player is not playing music CDs" with two different modern DVD drives, so I downgraded it to a CD RW only drive, which solved the problem. I still don't know what the real problem is.

I have this with newer drives. I think the problem is simply past 2002 or so new drives dropped this because Windows 2000 and XP both automatically set for digital audio, bypassing that cable to the sound card. Not like anybody was using those new drivers with Windows 3, right? 🤣

SRQ wrote:

tayyare wrote:

I have a Pentium MMX machine that runs MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 and windows 95 in multiboot configuration. I had the problem "Creative CD Player / MS CD player is not playing music CDs" with two different modern DVD drives, so I downgraded it to a CD RW only drive, which solved the problem. I still don't know what the real problem is.

I have this with newer drives. I think the problem is simply past 2002 or so new drives dropped this because Windows 2000 and XP both automatically set for digital audio, bypassing that cable to the sound card. Not like anybody was using those new drivers with Windows 3, right? 🤣

Yeah, right... 🤣