Decent drives for burning CD-Rs?

So, modern Blu-Ray burners barely burn CDs at all, and mostly as an afterthought at high speeds. Needless to say, older systems like a SegaCD, Saturn, PS1 etc have a very hard time reading these disks even burned at the slowest (which is still far too fast) setting these newer drives let you.

Is there still a maintained list or recommendations anywhere of a drive one can get that still does a decent job burning CDs and/or lets you burn them at a very low speed? Was there anything USB based that was even good, or would all of them be internal (which I assume means IDE, which would be hard to get even get working properly on a modern system).

 

I use an Apple USB Superdrive on my Macbook Pro (dual boot with Win8.1). I find ImgBurn does a good job for Saturn CDs, have never had a failure.

 

The Yamaha CRW-F1UX is USB, although not very portable and with a dedicated power supply, and it's a great burner. Probably among the best for 99min discs. I have one and it never failed me.

Plextor drives from the early-mid 2000's are very good too. IIRC @Bad_Ad84 has some strong opinions about what drives are good or crap.

If it's not important for your that the CD survives for years, and if you're not too worried about the wear on the optics of your console (e.g. you don't play that much really, or just want to test something quickly), then any portable USB DVD-writer should do a potable job.

 

Asus DRW-24B3LT , it’s an internal SATA Drive , I used it for PS1 , Saturn and Xbox 360 backups , not one bad burn on either platform . It was primarily used for XGD 3 games and always got insanely good KProbe results . Side note though the drive was cross flashed with iXtreme Burner MAX firmware and was used for Lightscribe as well .

 

I've always been under the impression that while the burner is definitely an important factor, having good media is more important.

 

Drive (and potentially its firmware) plays a large part too.

It's certainly possible for good media to have a poor burn if the drive is either crap or its firmware doesn't write to those discs well.

 

Always the current cheapest model of the LG DVD burner line combined with supermarket spindles of CD-R.
E.g. : https://www.amazon.de/LG-GH24NSD1-AUAA10B-DVD-R-Bulk-Schwarz/dp/B013J7P05U/

The LG / spindle CD-R combo result always shows a good scope reading when running in a PSX.
A new Phillips burner and an older Samsung really hated the CD-Rs I have.
Their burns tended to corrections while burning (repeated slowdown / back up) and the RF reading on the scope (using a PSX) was horrible.

The cheap LG produces pretty good RF readings, for a CD-R anyway.
Those disks will have no issue playing in retro consoles, as long as their lasers aren't close to dying yet.

Edit:
Oh, and always(!) use the second fastest burn speed with that combination.
The firmware in new drives is not optimized for low speed burns and will make many mistakes.
For the LG, you want to use 40x and only that.

 

It's absolutely not needless to say. Entertaining urban legends like this will fade away if people don't repeat them often enough so they can be passed on to others.
I successfully burn discs for all those systems and more using some of the cheapest media I can find in the local computer market. I have 4 blue ray drives I use regularly and an older USB DVD/CD drive that works great. So neither BR or USB are "the problem". Some consoles are picky about the media. This indicates that media is a problem but the real problem is those consoles. And some burners are just useless. Maybe you just have one of those. I have several drives I don't use because some consoles just don't seem to like discs burned with them.