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.

Re:HP DVD Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the entertainment industry, and we have to rip about 100 albums a month at work for online promotions of various sorts.

So, that's what you tell the judges?! And they believe it?!

"Well, your honor, I'm not a pirate! I'm doing this for promotional purposes for these movies and bands. Torrents? Oh! That's how we get our promotional copies. It's really efficient!"

Re:Please, dont "encode"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense! Encode at 128k to save a ton of space on your drive, then convert the files to FLAC whenever you need higher fidelity. Win-win!

Wrong approach

[turkeyfeathers]

Using a CD-ripper is so 1990s. What you want to do is buy a good quality scanner and scan your CDs using high-resolution mode -- should take about 20 seconds per disk. Then use any of the usual conversion programs to convert the scanned images into whatever audio format you prefer.

Re:Online storage?!

[PCM2]

Keep your cds in a box somewhere as a catastrophic recovery, and have one duplicate of your ripped files offline somewhere.

So glad you told him this. Too bad that he had already thrown half of his CDs into the furnace before he heard your advice.

Re:Online storage?!

[Chuck Chunder]

In any case, there were tracks in the silver like some animal scurrying and eating through the layer.

That's the problem with WORM media.

Re:HP DVD Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you'd feel better if you tried windows 7.