If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.

You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO

Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/

Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/

Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database.

https://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm

Note of caution about others comments that suggests using cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks, and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to the drive raw accuracy.

That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.

Safest would probably be any drive from the "top drives" AccurateRip list here: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-ripper/3247...

If you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and use that!

Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress

I do have this[1] one (product code: 43888 not 43889). Ripped a bunch of CDs perfectly.

AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.

[1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--burne...

As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a lot.

To piggyback, is there a good USB Blu ray drive?

(And is there a known good CLI tool for backing up copies of them?)

I have some Blu Rays I worry will be lost to disc rot 20 years from now...

any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs.

so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.