Plextor offers refurbished drives. If you do a search of the WWW you can find places that sell them. I walked into our local independent computer store and laying on the shelf was a brand new, still in the box Plextor drive. It seems as if the store had ordered the drive for a customer and then they reneged on the purchase. I got it for under $100. They’re still around the trick is to find them. Best of luck!
I have an old Plextor Premium and a Premium II that both work well with WaveLab 8.5.30 in a USB enclosure. I also have a newer USB Apple SuperDrive which also works well in WaveLab.
I have not tried any others and CD/DVD burning is becoming pretty rare these days.
I have one of those drives, but I only got it to burn Blu-Ray Audio with Cirlinca, which it worked fine for. For a Blu-Ray burner it’s a great deal. I haven’t tried it with Wavelab but I should probably run a cd master just to see.
Personally I’d prefer something with a drop-in slide-out tray for day to day, because this drive requires you to snap the disc into (and out of) the inner circular plastic prongs on the drive (like snapping in and out of a plastic jewel box). Maybe I could get used to it, but that’s possibly one thing to consider.
For CD with Wavelab I use a Pioneer DVR-118 in an external Firewire/USB enclosure.
If I was getting something else, I might try to find a Plextor that reads CD track end markers (and indexes?) from disc when importing in Wavelab. Not sure what Plextor models can do that. I have a couple of bare Plextor drives here that can’t.
edit: it would be nice if Wavelab could do that (read CD end marks and indexes) from more drives. Somehow EAC can do it from every off-the-shelf drive I’ve tried.
The other thing about that drive is it’s bus powered. If you have USB3, one connector is required to be plugged in. If you have USB2, two connectors are required to be plugged in. (it has a 2 port cable). It has a power supply jack, but no included power supply.
