The current crop of cheap IDE CD-ROM drives are almost all rubbish. The worst part is that I have found no reliable way of telling the difference.
When CD-ROM drives first became popular they were reliable, if a little slow. The double-speed drives read everything you put in them without a hitch. Since then there has been a competition to get the fastest claimed read speed on the front of the box.
These claimed read-speeds are often a lie. The original CD-ROM drives read data at a constant speed of 150K/s, 300K/s or 600K/s for single, double or quad-speed. This was important for streaming audio or video in for multimedia work. In order to achieve the constant data rate the drive had to alter the rotation speed depending on whether the head was near the centre or edge of the disk.
So-called high-speed drives don't vary the speed, they just spin as fast as they can. This means that the data rate isn't constant. The figure they quote is the maximum achievable, with the head on the outside edge of the disk. They aren't so keen to quote the average, which would be a truer basis for comparison. As long as it always makes 300K a second you shouldn't notice a problem for video, but it may not be as fast as you think for anything else. A true 8x drive could easily outperform a maximum speed 24x on data transfers.
But this isn't the worst of it - cheap drives with high rotation speeds are far more prone to errors. I keep coming across machines with drives that refuse to read particular disks - and I don't just mean horrible scratched CD-Rs! As the mechanism gets old (i.e. after six months) there is so much slop in them that they cannot hold their place on the disk. This means they keep having to re-seek, or can't get to files at all.
Cheap fast CD-ROM drives are a waste of money. I'd rather have a good quality true 4x or 8x that worked all of the time. Unfortunately these appear to have been relegated to the SCSI market. Try Toshiba or Hitachi.
Finally, beware the combined DVD/CD drives. They may be able to read CD-ROM disks as well as the new DVD format, but they have had problems with CD-R. I'm told this has been cured, but they would say that, wouldn't they? Time will tell, but I'd rather carry on reading my CD-ROM collection.