Good Replacement CD Optical Drive

[Michael S.]

Lately my computer's optical drive has not been working well and wondering if time to replace. Are there any recommendations for a good optical drive that is particularly good at securely ripping CD's that have light damage?

[Michael S.]

This would be an internal optical drive in a desktop computer. The original optical drive was a cheaper model that has failed recently. Looking for a good internal optical drive with superior ability to read lightly damaged discs securely. It does not have to be able to write CD's or read DVDs. Hope to order from Amazon or similar. Thanks for any help or suggestions on where to look. Are the best brands Plextor, Samsung and LG?

[GBrown]

Best to have a couple of different drives if possible. Some read through different kinds of errors better than others. Ultimately the AccurateRip feature of dbpa will tell you if the rip is good regardless of the drive. LG, Pioneer, ASUS, and Plextor have all been good for me.

[Michael S.]

I decided to just put in a Asus DVD/CD optical drive similar to the original obtained from my local computer shop. It only cost about $23. So far it is working great and is actually much quieter than the original OEM drive. I figure it may be best to mainly use good cheapies for the most part that can be replaced as they wear out. I decided to try the replacement operation myself and everything seems to be working fine. The swap wasn't too bad, there were only two screws securing it to the frame and two cables to unplug and replug. This avoided the need to take into the computer shop, pay additional fees and wait several weeks. I may get a second higher quality external drive in future to see if it can help with problem disks.

[schmidj]

The cost of the drive has little to no relationship to their performance as CD rippers. I have an assortment of drives, mostly salvaged from old computers or bought used. Some drives will read somewhat scratched CDs without errors, but choke (slow down to near zero) on more damaged CDs, even trying to read them using burst mode. Others may read another damaged CD without error or with inaudible errors, or be more likely to read undamaged CDs at a higher speed.

I've ripped over 100,000 tracks on thousands of CDs and never had a (internal) drive fail that I can recall. Writing media is much more likely to fail than a failure to be able to read them. I did have a CD "blow up" in a drive, the CD had a slight crack near the center hole. When it revved up there was suddenly quite a bang and pieces of plastic and silver coating came out of the slot in the front! I actually "recovered" the drive by disassembling it and removing the debris (not easy, I kept finding more) and got it to work again, it still does. I kept it as it is the only one of that make I own.

The computer (home built) has three "internal" SATA drives and three more "internal" drives with SATA to USB and external power adapters sitting on top. I've always had much better luck with internal drives, including the ones outside the computer connected with the USB adapters, than with any external (as sold) USB drives. Part of that becomes obvious if you read the specs, many "external" drives read slower, etc. Part of it was recently pointed out by Spoon who pointed out that many USB ports have limited power current available, using an externally powered USB hub may help solve that.

I have all those drives for two reasons. I've done a fair amount of location recording, and used to distribute the finished product on CDs which I could burn 6 at a time with that setup. Now distribution is via the Internet and occasionally with thumb drives. I doubt I'll ever use up my stock of raw blank CDs. I might have burnt 3 or so in the last year.

But the other reason is that when I have a big batch of CDs to rip at the same time I run multiple instances of dBpoweramp, each on a different drive. I have three video monitors, two instances of dBpa on each. I have to keep my wits about me to avoid accidentally removing the wrong CD mid-rip, but running multiple instances can be a big time saver, particularly if the CDs aren't in Accuraterip (many of the CDs I rip are from the Caribbean and not common) and if the online metadata (or CD text) is reasonably accurate.

Collect the CD/DVD drives from friends who are replacing old desktop computers, they will usually let you get them for free. But, as less and less computers come with these drives, you shouldn't wait too long before starting collecting.