Pioneer drives are considered the best, but they pretty much all come with
new firmware that is incompatible. The
sellers on this forum have some Pioneer drives with older, compatible firmware.
If you live in Europe, you could buy a Verbatim 43888 which will probably come with an older Pioneer drive inside it (
although not always) that will work with MakeMKV out of the box. This drive isn't quite as good a newer full sized Pioneer drive, but it is cheaper and potentially easier to get.
There are potentially other specialty Pioneer drives that can be flashed to work with MakeMKV. I don't have any experience with them, but look for posts from Coopervid.
After the Pioneer drives, the slim LG drives are probably the best. The BU40N or some of the newer variants. Before we had access to the Pioneer drives, these were considered the best. They all have to be flashed, but they're probably relatively easy to come by. With any of the slim drives, the key is making sure they get plenty of power from high powered USB ports.
The LG/ASUS full sized internal drives are probably ranked at the bottom of the list. These drives have to be flashed. You might get one that works well, but the quality of these drives has gone down in recent years. The possibility of a DOA drive is relatively high and there are lots of reports of these drives suffering an early death. If you find yourself buying one of these drives, buy the cheapest one you can find from a place with a good return policy. Despite whatever branding is on the box, they're all the same inside and all made by LG.