WHAT'S THE BEST CD-ROM DRIVE?  (7.3)
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       There are three features you should look for in a CD-ROM drive.  
  First and most importantly you want at least a double-speed drive.  
  If cost is your only concern single speed drives are available for 
  as little as $25 but they're painfully slow for most applications.  
  You'll also sacrifice many other bells and whistles.  NEC recently 
  introduced a 8X CD mechanism which is sold both by them 
  and other manufacturers.  These drives cost about 50% more than a 
  similar 4X speed drive.  They may be useful if you mainly 
  retrieve text, graphics and other data files from CDs.  However most 
  multimedia applications and games designed to be run from a CD are 
  optimized to work best at 4X or slower and will gain little if any 
  advantage from a 8X drive. 

  Secondly the drive should be "multi-session, PhotoCD compatible."  
  Many drives on the market advertised as "PhotoCD compatible" but 
  can only read the first set of photos on a PhotoCD.  

       Finally you want a drive with excellent audio capabilities 
  including playback of audio CD's and digital copying of audio CD's 
  to your hard disk.  That last capability is the kicker.  It's 
  available out of the box only with the various versions of the Apple 
  CD-300, but FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit adds support for digital audio
  extraction on drives.