SATA or external drive recommendations?

I just spent the last 6 hours or so testing various things to
determine why I was getting obvious and really awful skips and other
audible defects with scratched CDs in cdparanoia.

Turns out it is probably due to my new drive being one of the crappy
ones with a cache that cdparanoia doesn't know how to model (yet),
since 'cdparanoia -A' fairly reliably returns "PARANOIA MAY NOT BE
TRUSTWORTHY WITH THIS DRIVE!".  I've sent several analysis logs to
paranoia-dev, so hopefully that will help, but I have a whole bunch of
CDs I'd like to rip ASAP, so I would probably rather not wait and
instead just get a new drive that doesn't suck.

I had a PATA drive that worked fine, but I had to replace my mobo and
accidentally got one without enough PATA connectors, so I bought a new
SATA drive.  It's the new SATA that won't rip reliably.  So, I'm
looking for a SATA that works well with cdparanoia, or an external.
Thanks!

frustrated,

--eric