My evaluation criteria would be if it's listed on CloneCD's web site of CD-ROMs that are able to read sub-channel data. They mention Toshiba, and Sony as good ones.
here's the link:
http://www.elby.de/CloneCD/english/hardware.htm
If you find one you think you want see if www.cdrinfo.com has a write up about it. They'll tell you what kind of media they've had success with. The 72 truex had problems on blue media.
I should also mention that before, I said I had not gotten Diablo 2 to run on my 72 truex. I tried it last night and everything works fine. Strange... I have a sneaking suspiscion however that it had to do with my power supply. Power supply? Yes, because when I first installed it, it was one of two new drives I bought that day. The other was a DVD-ROM. It turned out after some trouble shooting why my computer suddenly wouldn't turn on was because I was trying to run too many drives off of my 250 watt power supply. If I unplugged one of the drives, the computer would boot normal. So I held off on my DVD drive and downloaded the firmware update for the 72 truex with the specific purpose of trying to play Diablo 2. The game would boot up fine but after a few seconds it gave me a blue screen and exited from Diablo. I'm thinking that since I was right on the edge of my power limits, the laser, which is already not as intense as single laser drives since it is split into 7 beams, was lacking the intensity it needed to reliably read the CD.
I said screw it that night and put it into my SCSI CD-RW and played it. Since that night I have upgraded to a 400 Watt power supply and I hadn't tried playing it in the 72 truex until last night when someone in this forum said they had no problems with it. Maybe I'm just pulling stuff out of my butt here, but that is really the only thing I have changed to my configuration since last trying it, other than moving a few cards around in the PCI slots and installing the DVD-ROM. Maybe I was getting bus conflicts, but I'm pretty sure it was a read error since it didn't totally lock up Win98, it just kicked me out of the game.
According to cdrinfo.com the 72 truex by far outperforms other drives with what they call "pressed media" which I assume is another name for mass produced CD's like music CD's. And really the only major problem that stuck out was reading the blue CD-RW media. It said it also worked well with the gold and some other color. The blue I believe is the cheapest on the market, so I guess there is a good reason to go with high quality recordable disks...
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