Well I'd get rid of any Old CD Drives if you've got DVD Drives to cover them. I know none of my retro machines have a single CD Drive, they all have 1-2 DVD-RW IDE Drives

Haha, welcome to the club. I don't like getting rid of old optical drives because sometimes old burned disks are fussy and need old drives to be read reliably.

I think a good starting point would be to first see which of those 80 odd drives are still working.

I've had optical drives fail over the years and in some cases had to bin them.
Sometimes it's something easy to fix (like a new drive belt for the drive tray).

I recently got hold of a single speed Panasonic drive (with drive caddy) that I want to try out to see if it still works 😀

The old drives with the separate front panel jacks and play/advance buttons are genuinely neat. And I guess some of the slower ones are nice since they stay quiet without requiring any fiddling with drivers. And if you have SCSI, then I suppose you need a SCSI drive.

Then there are some specific models that worked with specific hardware. The 3DO Blaster, for instance, required the Panasonic CR-563, which I also recall was the only drive supported by the IDE interface on the Pro Sonic 16. But I'd be kind of surprised if there was a disc that was not readable in a newer drive and required an older one.

On a side note, I would not have expected that caddies would stop being a thing. Twenty years ago, I remember the library kept every disc in its own caddy. It seemed like a good idea.

SuperDuty455 wrote:

I wonder if some are worth keeping or selling.

I doubt you'll find a buyer for old optical drives, expect maybe in bulk.

They will only be worth something once we threw them all away.... like with all old hardware.

DVD-RW reads everything, no need for other drives except the old 2x/4x ones or a nice slot-in drive or something like that. If you want to keep something keep the best. In this case drives like plextor etc. If they ever come in demand people want the best there was.

Idk, I find DVD support on older IDE and EIDE systems to be a bit lacking. Keep all the special interface ones, and if you need to let some go, I actually suggest letting go of a few modern DVD drives if your not using them, because in the grand scheme of things, I see it being a long while until IDE DVD/DVD+RW drives (Make sure DVD+RW, DVD-RW may have compatibility issues with some media) are sought after. Again, keep your good drives, ditch the cheap crap.

And I have a good heap of optical drives, but 80? I'd hate (Or love) to see what piles you have.

Also a GREAT thing to do if you need to get rid of drives is to make a collector's day and give a few away to either VOGONS members, or other retro people (Provided they pay shipping, :3). That way you know your drives and other retro parts are going to a good home and are going to provide more hours of enjoyment than you could have with them.

Now I just wish you have 80 floppy drives, then you could make a music setup....

I had done a test session a while ago, and as far as I remember, they all work. Those that didn't were put aside and thrown away.

The ones I'd like to keep :
- the Pioneer slot in drives
- the very old ones (I have an odd NEC four discs charger CD drive with a black bezel...from 1995)
- some of the faster DVD drives and burners
- any drive that is compatible with sound cards or other specific hardware, I'll have a look for an eventual Panasonic CR-563.

As far as giving them away instead of throwing them, that would be the ideal solution. But being in France, the shipping would make the deal uninteresting for anyone outside of the EU.
I used to love dumpster diving, I grabbed a few computers a week at the local recycling center. And most of them had at least one drive. Also, I buy job lots of vintage computer parts for my collection, but the lots generally have useless parts like drives, IDE, parallel cables, etc...

Errius wrote:

Haha, welcome to the club. I don't like getting rid of old optical drives because sometimes old burned disks are fussy and need old drives to be read reliably.

I don't like to get rid of things that work in general 😜 But yeah, I've had trouble reading discs too so having another unit to test them is never a bad idea.

As for 3.5 floppy drives...I have about 50 ! These don't take half as much space though and are always useful for retro machines. Not that I need 50 either, so many will have to go.

I deeeeefinitely need to get rid of that 😵 80 was an understatement, there are 110 drives, and some are missing :

HP burner, far left bottom one. That was one of the very best readers i've ever seen. A good one and i would keep it.

Only seeing 2 slot-in drives. These are not common and surely should stay. Every drive with a big name in front looks cool so the Creative, Asus, Samsung etc. i would keep also. (NOT the philips burners, i hated those. Bad ones)
Maybe a few early ones but burn the rest or kill em with a shotgun. Blow up 40 floppy drives when you're at it, 10 is enough.

I keep all optical drives with a silver-colored front bezel, all beige DVD drives (if they can also burn, that's a plus), all better black-colored DVD IDE drives and all SCSI drives.

I also already had a large stash of optical drives with virtually something of anything in it, many of those very loud 32x/40x/48x/52x CDROM drives, a few CDROM burners without the burnproof thingy, some weird slot loader but supposedly could take more than one disk or something (I tested it years ago it was in working condition too) that won't accept the smaller 180MB-or-something optical disks that are nowadays virtually non-existent. Should still have a couple blanc 3.5in CDROM disks somewhere, all with nice colors 🤣. And if I ever ever manage to find a 3.5in optical drive, I will want it even though it'll be useless 🤣!

And I also got some caddy optical reader along with a single caddy, never tested it.

Maybe I should do a quick count on the number of opticalo drives I have, I never bothered to do a headcount.

meljor wrote:

HP burner, far left bottom one. That was one of the very best readers i've ever seen. A good one and i would keep it.

Only seeing 2 slot-in drives. These are not common and surely should stay. Every drive with a big name in front looks cool so the Creative, Asus, Samsung etc. i would keep also.
Maybe a few early ones but burn the rest or kill em with a shotgun. Blow up 40 floppy drives when you're at it, 10 is enough.

I wouldn't throw out any 3.5in floppy drive now and 10 floppy drives is far from enough 😈
They take up hardly any space and are easy to stack.

I don't think 3.5" floppy drives will ever be worth much. Too many were produced, and they're still in production now (as USB units)

Errius wrote:

I don't think 3.5" floppy drives will ever be worth much. Too many were produced, and they're still in production now (as USB units)

They used to say the same thing about a lot of things. AT cases, 486 motherboards, most 3DFX cards (except Voodoo 5 and maybe 4), and Virges used even to be thrown out by the buckets. And the newer USB ones are fairly limited compared to the older internal ones. The very old 3.5in floppy drives may become more interesting in a way, many actually had jumpers and other special stuff that the later mass produced drives omitted. There's no guarantee anything in particular will become very precious, but the 2.88MB floppy drives are already WAY more expensive then what I paid for them.

But I do agree that most 3.5in floppy drives will probably take a veeery long while before these will start to become harder to find, though this will hit new collectors more then older ones like us as we've already stocked up cheaply. 5.25in floppy drives are another story.

I don't really like buying floppy drives or any other internal drives along with PCBs in single batches via mail as some sellers have the tendency to kinda want to throw everything in a single box that will go pinball madness all the way through shipping (CPU heatsinks sometimes do this also).

I think stuff like this is actually interesting to think about.

SuperDuty455 wrote:

I had done a test session a while ago, and as far as I remember, they all work. Those that didn't were put aside and thrown away […]
Show full quote

I had done a test session a while ago, and as far as I remember, they all work. Those that didn't were put aside and thrown away.

The ones I'd like to keep :
- the Pioneer slot in drives
- the very old ones (I have an odd NEC four discs charger CD drive with a black bezel...from 1995)
- some of the faster DVD drives and burners
- any drive that is compatible with sound cards or other specific hardware, I'll have a look for an eventual Panasonic CR-563.

As far as giving them away instead of throwing them, that would be the ideal solution. But being in France, the shipping would make the deal uninteresting for anyone outside of the EU.
I used to love dumpster diving, I grabbed a few computers a week at the local recycling center. And most of them had at least one drive. Also, I buy job lots of vintage computer parts for my collection, but the lots generally have useless parts like drives, IDE, parallel cables, etc...

Errius wrote:

Haha, welcome to the club. I don't like getting rid of old optical drives because sometimes old burned disks are fussy and need old drives to be read reliably.

I don't like to get rid of things that work in general 😜 But yeah, I've had trouble reading discs too so having another unit to test them is never a bad idea.

As for 3.5 floppy drives...I have about 50 ! These don't take half as much space though and are always useful for retro machines. Not that I need 50 either, so many will have to go.

I deeeeefinitely need to get rid of that 😵 80 was an understatement, there are 110 drives, and some are missing :

Build a coffee table? Holy crap that's a lot of optical drives.

SCSI. At least keep the scsi. IDE CD/DVD drives are a dime a dozen (ok, they're $3 ea) at my local thrift store. However, I've never seen a SCSI drive yet there (unless its part of a tower PC), and they go for about $20-50 on ebay.

SuperDuty455 wrote:

I deeeeefinitely need to get rid of that 😵 80 was an understatement, there are 110 drives, and some are missing :
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/609/3186863638 … a23ab5918_h.jpg

Re: the floppy drives, I see a Mitsumi combination card reader+floppy drive at the bottom-right corner. These are worth keeping, I think. I have one myself, though the card reader part of it (plugs into the motherboard through standard USB header) got zapped by a bad PSU and doesn't work. 😢

Tetrium wrote:

all beige DVD drives (if they can also burn, that's a plus)

This. Perfect for retaining the retro look while giving the flexibility of 4GB worth of file transfers in one fell swoop.

CD audio cables are an annoyance. There were several different connectors in use in the 1990s, before manufacturers all settled on MPC-II. See the pic at bottom of this page:

http://www.walshcomptech.com/ohlandl/misc/CDROM.html

I have a nice Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM I want to use in a DOS build but I don't have the cable for it.

Keep any working drives with a nifty door mechanism 😀

Here's the complete list : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JYdWs … cLog/edit#gid=9

I didn't realize there are so many Samsung and GoldStar/LG/HL drives !

I've done a very quick power up test with all of them, and put aside those that won't open, or react. Some needed a little bit of persuasion to open smoothly, I guess the grease hardens overtime. It doesn't mean they work, but at least they open.