What are the best external optical drives to rip your CD's to FLAC?

wife discovered a box full of CD’s, so I’d like to rip them so she can listen to them.

no PC with a 5.25" bay, so it needs to be external.

what are your thoughts/ recommendations?

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totally misread that to start lol. when i need to use my cd rom i take the side panel off and plug it in siting next to the pc on the desk.

your just ripping them, right? no need for a permanent solution or to spend money if you have a cd rom anywhere.

keep editing lol. if you dont have a rom drive anywhere, go online and buy the cheapest one and do what i said above.

I’ve been using a USB connected cd drive with my laptop .
Bought it on Amazon for around 30$ three or 4 years ago. Still working fine.

Since the data on CDs is stored digitally with a lot of error correction/recovery data, it shouldn’t make a difference quality-wise which drive you use.

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I love my Apple Superdrive. Small, well built and made out of metal. Love it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PVX682Q + whatever old internal CD drives you have lying around. External drives are overpriced. Have my Asus BluRay drive hooked up with it for convenient movie ripping.

I do a load of ripping as I prefer to buy CDs (mainly used).

So I use a LiteOn IHAS124-14 24x SATA Internal DVD-RW plus a powered USB adaptor like this https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07JGT17B8/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_image_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

and dbpoweramp software (it’s paid software but does secure rips and compares to AccurateRip database).

I’m using one of these. You can get from Amaazon too.
When I bought it I was looking mainly for an external enclosure but I saw this one that came with a drive that seemed robust enough to support my needs too.