Fazeshift wrote on 2026-03-04, 15:56:

For drives with failed gears - can you list the drive brands and model?

I have a 20-30 IDE drives in a box, and perhaps one of those would be a good example to investigate.

At least one Lite-On DVD-ROM with severe yellowing on the front bezel, it was cooking in an attic warehouse for a while, and at least one MSI CR-52 CD-RW, again with severe yellowing but kept in better conditions. Both from early 2000s. Both had heavy use for years. To verify the models I'd have to dig deep into my storage area. Neither was originally owned by me, acquired much later. And I remember at least one Compaq OEM from circa 1996.

to rejuvinate rubber, spray it with silicone spray if its not dried out to the point its cracked, for the gears servisol super 10 for cleaning/lubrication, as for the magnet thing thats a bad idea, if you demagnitize you will end up with disc slippage, i would strongly advise against doing this.

its more likely the circular rubber pad on the spindle going gammy and sticking to the disc with the magnet, hence why it only happens when theres no disc inside, some silicon spray will help here, also magnets will demagnetize over time so check its still good and actually a magnet and not a magnetized metal disc, in which case you should re-magnetize.

last thing to check is the motor that ejects the tray as they will struggle as they wear with age and dust cloggage, if it struggles to eject with the top of the drive off (either not at all or slowly), its either motor or mechanism or more likely both.

also bear in mind some drives are just shit from new (the types that dont have a tray) i used to fix a lot of new lcds with built in dvd drives that would jam up for no reason trapping the disc inside, not much you can do to fix shit design.

Fazeshift wrote on 2026-03-04, 15:56:

For drives with failed gears - can you list the drive brands and model?

I have a 20-30 IDE drives in a box, and perhaps one of those would be a good example to investigate.

As luck would have it, I got another batch of old optical drives and I can confirm one of the gears on a LiteOn SOHR-5238S CD-RW drive has severe yellowing, unlike the other nylon gears that are pristine white, proving it is made of a different plastic.

I usually see this type of yellowing on the belt wheel, like on an Asus DVD-E616P2 from the same batch.

Funnily enough, the faceplates of these drives show little to no yellowing.

I went through most of my old optical drive collection. The main purpose was to get organized and take an inventory, but I also wanted to see if I can make any reliability hypothesis from the stats to share here. That mostly consisted of connecting a power supply only and checking drive tray open/close functionality.

I tried to focus on drives I have in quantity, with a known history, to assess based on design/engineering/materials quality. Most of mine were diverted from recycling, at a former IT job on a college campus. I pulled them from professor/staff PC's - it is unlikely that any were heavily used in this setting, and they were not subject to potential abuse in computer labs. The IT target refresh cycle was 3 years, so most of them were retired after no more than 3~4 years. I used a handful of them lightly for various retro PC builds over the years, but a majority were stored in boxes/totes in a climate-controlled basement. In other words, this might be as close to a best case scenario for secondhand vintage optical drives. Any perceived long-reliability is not like to apply for drives that experienced a rough life (E.g., used for a decade in dusty/smokey environment, abandoned in hot/humid storage, physically tossed into trash/recycling, then rescued and resold.) I'm doubt I have enough data to draw any solid statistical conclusions, but hopefully it is somewhat useful.

There are 39 drives, all 5.25" internal, motorized tray load, IDE. I excluded SATA, SCSI, MKE, etc - I don't have many of these anyway.

Mitsumi CRMC-FX400D (CD-ROM 4x)
All are manufactured Aug-Oct 1995, Gateway 2000 OEM P/N CDRQDR001AAUS or CDRIDE012AAWW
6 Total
100% working tray open/close, but 1 of them was noticeably slower.
I randomly picked 1, put it in a retro build (Pentium 200 MMX) and played several games (including mixed-mode w/ redbook audio) without issue over the last month.
I opened one briefly - this appears to be a belt-free design, which a magnet-based center spindle clamp.
At 4x, the drive spinning is fairly quiet, but the laser seek is on the loud side.

Toshiba XM-6202B & XM-6302B (CD-ROM 32x)
I grouped these 2 models together, as I cannot find any meaningful difference in design, specification or HW rev #. Only the ROM version differs.
All manufactured Jan-Aug 1998, Gateway 2000 OEM
10 Total (4* 6202, 6* 6302)
100% working tray open/close* (see below)
All but 1 sound "crunchy" while the tray is moving, and honestly, I remember pretty much all of them sounding this way across campus.
I selected a random XM-6302B to open and investigate. The good news - this is another belt-free design, magnet spindle. The bad news - the noise is due to a cracked tray motor gear, the white one:

Based on how widespread the tray noise is, both present and past, I can only assume the gear was flawed or fragile from the start. There is no impact functionality though - all of them open/close the tray just fine. Staying functional long-term is a big unknown.
I do NOT recommend attempting any further disassembly or DIY repair. Carefully removing, inspecting, and reinstalling the gear caused enough friction loss to cause slip and tray jam. I have decades of physical media device repair experience, and unfortunately these press-fit gears rarely do well after a glue repair. I have reproduced other similar gears, but I don't know if it would warrant such an effort, especially with devices like the PicoIDE coming out.

DVS DSR-600H (DVD-ROM 6x)
I only have 3 of them, all have Mar 1999 manufacture dates.
100% working tray open/close.
Unknown design - I haven't opened to see if it uses belts or spindle clamp type.

I have 11 more Toshiba drives that I need to verify model and test. 7 are installed in a CD-ROM network server, that I forgot I built, and the 4 others I see installed in some of my other old builds.

So far, I have come up with the follow hypotheses:
1. Belt-free designs are more likely to survive long-term
2. Older drive models are more likely to be over-engineered, or put another way, less subject to cost-cutting design decisions.
3. The evolution to higher speeds (and spindle RPM) necessitated revisions to disc spindle clamping design. The was a transition from magnet-based spindle clamping to soft/sticky materials was a downgrade in terms of long-term tray ejection reliability. (I wish I could find out a more exact date or model introduction)

songoffall wrote on 2026-04-26, 13:51:

As luck would have it, I got another batch of old optical drives and I can confirm one of the gears on a LiteOn SOHR-5238S CD-RW drive has severe yellowing, unlike the other nylon gears that are pristine white, proving it is made of a different plastic.

I usually see this type of yellowing on the belt wheel, like on an Asus DVD-E616P2 from the same batch.

Funnily enough, the faceplates of these drives show little to no yellowing.

Interesting coincidence - I just found a Lite-On DVD+R drive. It is an internal IDE drive, but without the outer metal casing, it came out of a Lite-On DVD video player/recorder that I purchased new 2004~2005. Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember the tray getting jammed due to a sticky spindle clamp after only a couple years. I remember picking up a cheap internal replacement, that also jammed up a couple years later.

I haven't looked inside yet.

As for your gears - I have seen softer materials used for gears to reduce noise, which are often the first materials to break down. For example - Onkyo used a some type of material for a gear that is notorious for turning brittle (or almost liquid) in a series of 1980's turntable automatic tonearm mechanisms.

Fazeshift wrote on 2026-05-06, 15:14:

I went through most of my old optical drive collection. The main purpose was to get organized and take an inventory, but I also […]
Show full quote

I went through most of my old optical drive collection. The main purpose was to get organized and take an inventory, but I also wanted to see if I can make any reliability hypothesis from the stats to share here. That mostly consisted of connecting a power supply only and checking drive tray open/close functionality.

I tried to focus on drives I have in quantity, with a known history, to assess based on design/engineering/materials quality. Most of mine were diverted from recycling, at a former IT job on a college campus. I pulled them from professor/staff PC's - it is unlikely that any were heavily used in this setting, and they were not subject to potential abuse in computer labs. The IT target refresh cycle was 3 years, so most of them were retired after no more than 3~4 years. I used a handful of them lightly for various retro PC builds over the years, but a majority were stored in boxes/totes in a climate-controlled basement. In other words, this might be as close to a best case scenario for secondhand vintage optical drives. Any perceived long-reliability is not like to apply for drives that experienced a rough life (E.g., used for a decade in dusty/smokey environment, abandoned in hot/humid storage, physically tossed into trash/recycling, then rescued and resold.) I'm doubt I have enough data to draw any solid statistical conclusions, but hopefully it is somewhat useful.

The attachment PXL_20260319_124510501.jpg is no longer available

There are 39 drives, all 5.25" internal, motorized tray load, IDE. I excluded SATA, SCSI, MKE, etc - I don't have many of these anyway.

---

Mitsumi CRMC-FX400D (CD-ROM 4x)
All are manufactured Aug-Oct 1995, Gateway 2000 OEM P/N CDRQDR001AAUS or CDRIDE012AAWW
6 Total
100% working tray open/close, but 1 of them was noticeably slower.
I randomly picked 1, put it in a retro build (Pentium 200 MMX) and played several games (including mixed-mode w/ redbook audio) without issue over the last month.
I opened one briefly - this appears to be a belt-free design, which a magnet-based center spindle clamp.
At 4x, the drive spinning is fairly quiet, but the laser seek is on the loud side.

---

Toshiba XM-6202B & XM-6302B (CD-ROM 32x)
I grouped these 2 models together, as I cannot find any meaningful difference in design, specification or HW rev #. Only the ROM version differs.
All manufactured Jan-Aug 1998, Gateway 2000 OEM
10 Total (4* 6202, 6* 6302)
100% working tray open/close* (see below)
All but 1 sound "crunchy" while the tray is moving, and honestly, I remember pretty much all of them sounding this way across campus.
I selected a random XM-6302B to open and investigate. The good news - this is another belt-free design, magnet spindle. The bad news - the noise is due to a cracked tray motor gear, the white one:

The attachment PXL_20260322_160228322.jpg is no longer available

Based on how widespread the tray noise is, both present and past, I can only assume the gear was flawed or fragile from the start. There is no impact functionality though - all of them open/close the tray just fine. Staying functional long-term is a big unknown.
I do NOT recommend attempting any further disassembly or DIY repair. Carefully removing, inspecting, and reinstalling the gear caused enough friction loss to cause slip and tray jam. I have decades of physical media device repair experience, and unfortunately these press-fit gears rarely do well after a glue repair. I have reproduced other similar gears, but I don't know if it would warrant such an effort, especially with devices like the PicoIDE coming out.

---

DVS DSR-600H (DVD-ROM 6x)
I only have 3 of them, all have Mar 1999 manufacture dates.
100% working tray open/close.
Unknown design - I haven't opened to see if it uses belts or spindle clamp type.

---

I have 11 more Toshiba drives that I need to verify model and test. 7 are installed in a CD-ROM network server, that I forgot I built, and the 4 others I see installed in some of my other old builds.

So far, I have come up with the follow hypotheses:
1. Belt-free designs are more likely to survive long-term
2. Older drive models are more likely to be over-engineered, or put another way, less subject to cost-cutting design decisions.
3. The evolution to higher speeds (and spindle RPM) necessitated revisions to disc spindle clamping design. The was a transition from magnet-based spindle clamping to soft/sticky materials was a downgrade in terms of long-term tray ejection reliability. (I wish I could find out a more exact date or model introduction)

songoffall wrote on 2026-04-26, 13:51:

As luck would have it, I got another batch of old optical drives and I can confirm one of the gears on a LiteOn SOHR-5238S CD-RW drive has severe yellowing, unlike the other nylon gears that are pristine white, proving it is made of a different plastic.

I usually see this type of yellowing on the belt wheel, like on an Asus DVD-E616P2 from the same batch.

Funnily enough, the faceplates of these drives show little to no yellowing.

Interesting coincidence - I just found a Lite-On DVD+R drive. It is an internal IDE drive, but without the outer metal casing, it came out of a Lite-On DVD video player/recorder that I purchased new 2004~2005. Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember the tray getting jammed due to a sticky spindle clamp after only a couple years. I remember picking up a cheap internal replacement, that also jammed up a couple years later.

I haven't looked inside yet.

As for your gears - I have seen softer materials used for gears to reduce noise, which are often the first materials to break down. For example - Onkyo used a some type of material for a gear that is notorious for turning brittle (or almost liquid) in a series of 1980's turntable automatic tonearm mechanisms.

Great post there. Funny fact - almost every single optical drive I have from the 90s, even the slot-fed Compaq drives, are working flawlessly. Some are sounding crusty, so I might get in there with some PTFE lube to ease them up.

Your working drives also seem to be older models. Guess they were built differently then.

I hope the yellowing of the middle gear compared to others can be seen in this picture:

I would assume it's ABS plastic, unlike the white nylon ones.

Every single drive that has problems opening-closing is a late-model 52x CD-RW or 16x DVD-RW drive. It appears to affect Sony/Optiarc, LiteOn and LG drives. Which are most of what I have.

I get my drives from individual sellers, almost all of them have seen heavy use and been stored in average conditions - the usual dust and grime, but usually no corrosion or liquid spillage. On the optical side, all but one seem to be working perfectly.