Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping?

I recently retired my ancient AthlonMP rig for something a bit more modern, and in the upgrade got a new DVD±RW drive. Since I have the new rig and a lot more disk space, the time has come to re-rip my ~450 disc CD collection into FLAC (I trust active storage more than optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years). The optical drive I had in my old rig was one recommended by Hydrogen Audio or somewhere similar for ripping CDs, and can grab an hour long album in about five minutes. My new drive, unfortunately, takes about fifteen to do the same. With the number of discs I have to churn through and the near-instaneous encoding, it's somewhat annoying. After searching the Internet high and low for advice I came up empty handed, and so I ask Slashdot: are there any SATA DVD burners that don't suck at ripping CDs? Read on for more details if you wish.

To work around the problem, I've temporarily yanked an old Promise IDE card I had in an ancient K6-2 rig (timothy found parts of it in a dumpster even) and am using the old drive, but it's approaching a decade and was pretty heavily used. What with having lots of moving parts and a laser or three, I don't see it lasting another decade, and I'd like to have a drive usable with a bus that hasn't been deprecated for almost as long. I'd also like to avoid anything that can read/write Bluray, because the hardware implemented DRM is pretty heinous.

For those interested in the gory details of the hardware I ran cdparanoia -A on both drives: ide drive, sata drive. As you can see, the old drive is way faster, and it looks like the primary difference is that it also has a cache that works with non-linear access, but that behaves "correctly." If you own a drive you want to recommend and can analyze it with cdparanoia, I'm interested in seeing the output.

A note on software suggestions: it has to be FSF-definition Free Software, and GNU/Linux is the only operating system in my house. That basically leaves... cdparanoia. I'm a bit uptight when it comes to tagging (mostly because: once I've done this, will I ever have the stamina to re-tag? Nope), but I'm not trying to start a pirate CD factory and don't really care about getting 100% frame-accuarate rips, just error-free ones.

Comments

Who cares?

[DogDude]

Why would you care how long a drive takes to rip a CD/DVD? Do you sit and watch and wait for each one to be ripped? Are you using some strange OS that only lets you do one thing at a time? I did the same thing a few years ago. I just had a big stack next to my primary computers, and just swapped them out while I was working on them. How long each one took wasn't relevant.

Re:HP DVD Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't get any sensible discussion here.

Around 2007, Microsoft realised tech sites like Slashdot had a significant involvement in the very public rejection of Vista as a replacement for XP. They hired several reputation management companies, including Waggener Edstrom and Burson Marsteller to manage their online presence before the W7 release.

One of the results of that was that the reputation mangers ran hundreds of sock-puppets in blogs and news aggregators, like Slashdot and Reddit. They swamped the discussions, including those unrelated to their OS with scripted comments based on a few themes - "Have you tried it yet?" "Much faster than XP" etc etc. There was no opportunity to discuss Linux/FOSS or any other non-proprietary effort without wading through dozens of highly moderated pro-Win 7 postings. Pretty much every first post was a Microsoft-favorable pamphlet.

The result was that almost anyone with a real interest in tech abandoned the site. There are still a few of the old die-hards here, but it's mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.