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Need a quiet CD or DVD drive with CD-RW support

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First post, by bristlehog

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I found myself often using CD-RW discs much for file transfer from modern to retro PCs. However, I have a hard time finding a CD-RW understanding yet quiet drive. I don't like drives that are trying to reproduce Boeing takeoff noises.

So far I only found one:

Plextor PX-130A (IDE DVD-ROM) - almost no any noise is heard from it

Ones I have tested but found unsatisfying:

NEC CD-3002A (IDE CD-ROM) - tested two of them, both are very loud
ASUS QuieTrack CB-5216A (IDE DVD-ROM) - very loud, should probably be called LoudTrack instead
Plextor PX-230A (IDE CD-RW) - a very loud stepbrother of silent PX-130A
Plextor PX-32TSi (SCSI CD-ROM) - moderately loud, SCSI 50-pin
Samsung Super Write Master =forgot its model number= (IDE DVD-RW) - loud, and neither analog nor digital audio outputs are supported

Any CD-RW-supporting drives you know of being quiet?

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Reply 2 of 4, by bristlehog

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Not very much, since I want my drives to be quiet in Windows too.

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Reply 4 of 4, by Samir

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The best drives you'll find for being quiet and speed were Plextor SCSI caddy-based drives. Back in the day, Plextor was THE most high performance CD drive out there, period. It was made better, ran quieter, and was faster.

It sucks that the whole caddy vs tray war ended with the tray winning. CD caddies were great to keep the CD in and keep it safe too. By this time, they would have been the standard 'jewel case' that the CDs even came in if the tray didn't kill the caddy.

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