I personally prefer the 5224A as it has no issues with any CD. I have a 716SA, a 760A and several other CD units. In my experience the DVD units are kind of duds with a lot of DVDs (and probably why Plextor went out of business) if you plan to dump DVDs too I would choose a better drive for that specifically and get one of the CD drives for CDs. The Vantec IDE to USB 2.0 and 3.0 adapters are both known to work and not very expensive.

I'm not planning on dumping DVDs myself, at least not any time too soon. My particular fascination at this point is with CD-i games that I can only find incomplete coverage on, or hardly any information at all. Thank you so much for your recommendations though. Will definitely keep those in mind.

PX-7XX series reads CDs and DVDs, while the other drives reads only CDs.
Aside from that i haven't noticed anything different between models, the drive reliability all depends on the state of laser wear IMO. Sometimes you may find a better model or a worst model, based on how many discs was readed with that particular drive. I own a PX-708A, a PX-716SA, a PX-W4012TU and a PX-W4824TA.

Great to know. Definitely thinking about either a PX-708UF or PX-716UF for myself, and hopefully I don't get a dud. Thanks so much for your help, man.

There's not a recommended model for CD-i games, it's a standard CD and any Plextor drive from the wiki page http://wiki.redump.org/index.php?title= … patibility can be used to dump it. Personally i've used a PX-716SA to dump a CD-i game without a problem, but like i said any drives from the wiki guide could read it.

Yeah, I've been looking at that page, but I wasn't entirely certain about what would be best. Definitely thinking about one the USB models, probably PX-708UF seeing as that's the most reasonably priced of them that I can find. Are there particular noted benefits to one model over another that you know of, or is it not going to make much difference for the purpose of dumping? Aside from what's noted on the wiki page, that is.