Hi,

The noise could come from the disk spindle friction/skipping or crusty laser pickup sled... For plastic parts use lithium grease. On metals use semi thick grease intended for fine mechanics.
Don't clean the optics with solvent type fluids or better any chemicals at all. I once ruined a Sony pickup by using Zeiss cleaner for cameras. It dissolved some some coating on the focus lense and it became opaque.
If the spindle ring disk holder is dusty try to clean it with scotch tape. The dirt will stick into the glue but the glue won't leave residue on the spindle.

Have a nice day!

DAVE86 wrote on 2023-03-13, 08:48:

Don't clean the optics with solvent type fluids or better any chemicals at all.

+1 for this. I've read about people doing it, I was doing it, until 1 time the lens immediately became white (and of course it was a descent hi-fi cd player, not some filthy pc cdrom sold by the kilo).

Other than cleaning, only greasing the sliding parts and changing the belt if it's loose come to mind.

I've only ever cleaned the optics with nothing more than a cotton bud (AKA Q-Tips to my USA friends) as it should never get greasy etc. but even just one tiny piece of dust can cause read issues.

Here is the CD-ROM Drive in question:

The first thing I noticed was the spring at the back was all mangled so I've replaced it with a slightly longer shiny silver version so that's one thing done.

I made a short YouTube video earlier and I could do with everyone's opinion on whether it sounds noisy or not as I'm used to pretty much silent optical drives these days and cannot remember if this is the right noise level or if I need to lubricate something to quieten it down a bit?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nEkFvPmchEU

So what do you think, leave as is or do I need to do anything else to this drive to ensure it remains in good working order?

Looks like a Philips buckling tray type. Probably has a Sony P151 pickup or earlier. 1995 date codes on some chips. These assemblies are somewhat noisy. Pretty standard 4x drive. It might even be able to read CD-RW too.
Unless the tray gets stuck I say leave it as is.

DAVE86 wrote on 2023-03-21, 09:34:

Unless the tray gets stuck I say leave it as is.

That's exactly what I've done as I've no experience with servicing an old optical drive before and I dont want to mess it up.

That sounds very natural to me. What matters is that the sound is smooth and doesn't have any irregularities or cracks or bumps. The common failure on tray mechanisms is the plastic gears. Those often crack under a little of misuse. Like when people force the tray to open without proper procedure.

That's one more reason why I cringe when seeing someone close the tray by pushing it in rather than press the eject button (even though people would argue this is by design).

To reduce this noise, you need to keep disassembling until you reach the gear assembly and clean those in place and relubricate them.

I don't like servicing CD drives as they are very delicate and just by opening the box you may get a spring jump in your face.

I vote to leave it as is. I don't think there is anything wrong with it.