Optical USB drive for ripping

I do not know which drives you’re referring to but my Aurender ACS100 rips cd layer of my SACD’s without any issues. If you’re concerned about ‘quality of rips’ then why not use Melco D100. For absolute zero compression, I recommend .wav format for your rips -)

bits are bits use the cheapest damn drive you can find. These cheap cd drives are used by businesse and homes to transfer data remember. They have to work perfectly or they would be useless. The master has spoken.

If you’re concerned about ‘quality of rips’ then why not use Melco D100. For absolute zero compression, I recommend .wav format for your rips -)

WRONG again. FLAC is just as good and takes up less space. And the melco d100 doesnt do anything more than a cheap $20 drive would. Prove me wrong

You can’t rip a SACD the same way as a CD. Sony made sure of that years ago, however, if you buy one of about a dozen Sony CD players or Play Stations from yesteryear and use some open source software that’s floating around on the web, you can rip a SACD to a DFS file. Oh and the files are huge! I’ve done it, it works, but almost all the albums are on Qobuz and Amazon HD now.

"Optical USB drive for ripping"

(reminder of OP)

I appreciate the discussion so far, but since I am in same boat as OP, I will request some suggestions for devices that fall into the above category (there are none so far): a usb optical drive for ripping. 

now, not to be a jerk (bad form for  essentially my first post to forum in decade), let me add some parameters/thoughts:

it would seem that the most basic of basic drives today can handle this task given good software and patience of user; it is, after all, old tech. a better drive will have a better interface, i.e. a later and faster version of usb (2.0, 3.0, thunderbolt, which should help speeds) and then there would be the question of power supply and heat if one expects to do some long rip sessions. Would not want to do that powered off computer bus I'm thinking. So those 2 criteria as first filters.

As for secondary filters, we all want best quality for price and usually willing to spend more for better equipment, I would be curious about a stand alone desktop cd/dvd drive with enough heft, decent power supply, and quality laser to serve mainly as initial ripper but also an occasional live player and not one that might need replacement in short order owing to burning out after reading1000 cds. If that makes sense. And still a budget, more computer than audiophile, device.

I guess this might also be the place where people suggest an all in one device that rips and store and streams. That would fall into the "best" category in the good, better, best suggestions. I'm more interested in the good and better levels, good=a basic computer device that can extract data way upstream of the playback/dac, better being also capable of live play into a streamer or dac, with a steady decent laser, as noted.