Anything made by Pioneer these days is a good choice. That said, Pioneer just recently exited the optical disc drive market a month or so ago, so you'll want to pick up a drive while you still can. They tend to be pricier than your generic external disc drive, but they are dead reliable, and fully compatible with software like EAC and XLD.

I have the Pioneer BDR-XS07S slot loading external BluRay burner drive and it does a great job ripping audio CDs.

I bought this Pioneer drive

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BN66KFV1/donhosek

last year after having two consecutive drives crap out on me with both not wanting to eject discs or acknowledge discs that were in the drive and it has worked perfectly for me for this year. It has my strong endorsement..

Pick up an internal drive and get a good enclosure. Way better than any of the external junk on Amazon. Better yet get one of the LG bluray drives that support ripping 4k discs. Might need to flash the firmware. That’s what I use and it’s great and really fast for plain cds as a bonus.

> Might need to flash the firmware.

I’m a fan of LibreDrive, but have you heard about any similar firmwares for this purpose?

More info about LibreDrive on the forum that hosts discussion about it and tools that it works with:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856

There was a thread for the drives model which I don’t have near me at the moment. Was a kinda sketchy windows app but now makemkv shows libredrive.

Yeah, there are a lot of installer apps/helper scripts that assist with installing LibreDrive firmware for compatible drives on different threads on the forum. I was asking about other approaches to doing the same thing that LibreDrive/MakeMKV does.

When I wanted one for ripping music CDs to my M1 Mac I bought the cheapest used USB to CD/DVD drive on eBay. It's a LITE-ON eUAU108 and hasn't failed me.

I tried buying a noname drive from AliExpress, and the drive wouldn't rip correctly with XLD...

You could rather salvage the drive from an old MacBook, works great with a cheap adapter

The Apple superdrive

While I've ripped hundreds of discs with mine, they do have some downsides. It can be a bitch and a half to get a disc out if it can't be read properly. Even drutil wouldn't eject such discs.

There's also no way to use mini CD/DVDs with them. Not that those were ever super popular but if you have any it's an annoyance.

I replaced my SuperDrive with an 5.25" internal drive in an external powered enclosure. I can always get unreadable discs out easily, have no problem with mini discs, and I'm not stuck with an extremely short USB cable.

A SuperDrive isn't a bad option but there's better available.