Looking for some opinions on the best CD (or DVD) drive to get. mainly concerned with audio quality, not much into DVD movies, so if getting a CD R/W drive only instead of the combo CD/DVD drive would produce higher quality audio extracts, i'd gladly go with that. are Plextor drives the best overall? any particular model that has better specifications? i see them boasting about their new PX-712SA, which is an "Optical SATA Drive". what the heck is that?

http://plextor.com/english/products/712SA.htm

please...tell me what you think! thanks very much for your time and help,


~Tyler J.

The drive you linked to is quite nice, but it has both DVD reading and writing capabilities. If you're not going to use either, then I'd look elsewhere.

I, personally, have a Plextor PlexWriter Premium, which does only CDs for only $100. It's very nice, and Plextor's PlexTools copies extremely scratched CDs very well (I'd say better than EAC).

The "Optical SATA Drive" means it's an optical drive (CD/DVD) with a Serial ATA connection. SATA is nice, but I don't think there is any advantage in getting a SATA CD drive. 52x CD reading is ~7.8 megabytes per second, nowhere close to saturating Parallel ATA's 100 megabytes per second.
Even 16x DVD reading (that the SATA drive has) is only 22.4 megabytes per second.

Omion

has the c1/c2 error features when read audio?

Yes, it does c1/c2 correction and reporting when reading audio. Apparently Plextors have very reliable c2 error reporting. And the PlexTools software has a nice c1/c2 error graph.