I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.
By then, it was all pretty well sorted despite that burner having no underrun protection.
The IBM Ultrastar 9ES drives kept it fed very well on that otherwise quite slow Slackware box.
Burn a CD, compile a kernel, and browse the web while watching some VCD rip of a music video in one corner of the screen? No problem.