aford10 :
Optical drives consume very little power. That shouldn't even be a consideration when choosing a drive. There isn't a big difference in noise levels either. If you get the drive capable of faster speeds, and it seems too noisy for you, you can turn down the speed. It's better to at least leave yourself the option. The cheap drives sell, because a lot of people bargain shop. Some learn from their mistakes, others don't.
Get a quality drive. You don't want to be replacing it within a year.
Turn down the speed? How does that work? From my experience, when reading from a drive, like when streaming a video off cd/dvd or performing software/game installation, the drive decides for itself how fast it will spin up. My current NEC drive is reasonably silent, i can hear it "ramping up" the speed if its read from alot, but it doesn't start at max speed right away.
The cheap drives i were referring to, were DVD-ROM drives, so not burners. My experience with some cheap models was they ramped up the speed to quickly, or even continuously. So watching a DVD gets tiresome because of the huge noise a spinning disc at x16 DVD speed produces. But i don't know many models or even if this is still an issue with what is on the market today. Just wanted to share my own experiences, as i found DVD drives fast enough with the read speeds becoming less of a concern than the noise production, and they are related ofcourse since faster moving parts means more friction and more noise.
Power consumption is a focus issue for me. I built a low-power dualcore PC with 4GB RAM that uses only 33W when idling, possible with a quite common AMD setup and SSD + PicoPSU power supply. In this case, i disliked the optical drive using power continuously so i removed it, and relied on the network where other PCs have DVDs as well. I noticed i needed an optical drive less and less over the past few years, and i actually just needed only one pc on the network to have a DVD drive. Anyway you're right this doesn't apply to the OP.