recommendations for good external optical drives

I bough a thinkpad x60 recently and plan to install either fedora or ubuntu on it. Since it does not have a cd drive, I need to buy an external drive (dock is too expensive for me). Does anyone have any recommendations, or know what wroks and what does not? Do the standard ones like memorex at circuit city or iomega at staples work? These are generally sold as windows xp compatible, and am not sure what to make of that for linux. These probably need some software installed on windows. That probably wont work then on linux. Suggestions?i prefer cd-rw and do not need dvd-r or dvd-rw.

I have no experience with external drives, but as far as brands go, I've had good experience under Linux with every brand I've used, and some of the cheaper brands actually lasted longer than the more expensive ones. SATA seems to throw Linux for a loop at times, but otherwise, I think you should be okay.

Hopefully, someone that uses external models will offer up some information for you.

Let us know how it goes.