Just get a drive from any old notebook of the last 15 years or so someone wants to throw out, and buy a USB to SATA slim cable.

I have this OWC Mercury Pro, which I purchased after going through several cheap ones from amazon that kept dying on me. So far it’s been great. I’ve been using it to rip my cd & dvd collection. FWIW I’m running Fedora 41 and it works great.

In my experience shit just works in Linux. I own an 10+ year old external DVD-Drive and an newer external BD-Diskdrive. And both of em work flawless on Manjaro.

I use a Asus ZenDrive V1M

Just CDs? Pretty much any of them

One of those cheap 12-15$ AliExpress DVD R/RW USB C drives did the trick for me.

Asus makes a slim 8x external DVD burner that rips CDs very well in Linux, comes with usb-c and usb-a (double connectors.)