If you have an Amiga equipped with a SCSI interface, it's perfectly possible to connect a SCSI CD-ROM drive such as this Toshiba XM-4101B to your machine.
Buying a CD-ROM drive for an A1200 is fairly straightforward because all A1200 drives use mechanisms capable of handling the entire range of CD-ROM software. You should be wary, however, when buying a CD-ROM drive for an A4000 one designed for pre-AGA Amigas.
If you want a SCSI or IDE CD-ROM drive for an A4000, ensure that it offers at least double speed data transfer rates and is multisession compatible. The advantages of a double-speed drive are obvious - it can transfer data to your Amiga twice as fast as a single-speed drive - but multisession compatibility is only useful if you need to read images from a PhotoCD disc.
The choice for A500 owners is somewhat limited. Commodore released the A570 CD-ROM drive several years back and although it's cheap and cheerful (some AF advertisers sell it for as little as £99), the A570 uses a single-speed mechanism and is not multisession compatible, but is still a worthwhile purchase.
The other option for the A500 is to add an external SCSI CD-ROM. Most A500 hard drives feature SCSI interfaces which are adequate for connecting a SCSI CD-ROM drive. All you then need is a CD-ROM filing system, many of which can be found in the PD libraries, to tell your Amiga how to communicate with the drive.
It may only be single speed and not PhotoCD compatible, but Commodore's A570 is still a great way of getting hold of PD software on CD-Rom
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