Excellent! Someone got my request right.
Immediately looked it up, the drive you are suggesting is 8 years old and can - by now - only be bought in india (pretty close though)
Well, i promise, on my last pc, i used the cd-drive maybe 2 times a month, still, i want it. The brand new drive i have just doesnt work. and since it has blueray support (among others), i guess this is just too much for the "mouse" to handle.

Weird part with the current one: i can read data from it. But nothing else (no write, no audio) and i am sceptical about a possible misconfig. The OS is only few weeks from standard install away and i did not mess with anything CD related. Also, i *could* reset the install to initial values (have a backup ready), just no fun then. Plenty of missing scripts/tools would be the onus.

Finally: no money involved. my vendor promised to replace the drive from the very beginning, when i still had much more serious issues with the setup, wasnt even sure if Ubuntu could run. (And still i am waiting for newer kernel releases for mcelog to work properly). So all has been payed by now.