These drives are absolutely interesting and IMHO, they are worth saving where possible. Common issues: * Tray belts stretch and dry out which causes belts to slip and the tray to get stuck. Eject mechanism has to slide and drop the whole laser assembly and then push the tray out. Plastic on plastic sliding gets harder as grease dries up and plastics become brittle and rough. - Fix 1: replace the belt (usually pretty easy once the cover is removed, some let you replace them from the slot in the tray.) - Fix 2: Disassemble and lubricate the sliding mechanism, tray slides and laser mechanism. - Fix 3: Add a little bit of tape to the magnetic clasp on the CD topper in the lid of the drive... Sometimes those can bind quite tightly to the motor hub and get a tray stuck too. A couple layers of cello-tape can help pull the assembly away from the CD. * CDs won't read: - This is often a combination of several issues. CD-Rs are notorious for being "too dark" for an aging laser diode and especially true for older CD drives. Test with stamped CDs were possible to ensure it isn't just a "CD-R" issue. - Laser power has degraded. In a "nothing to lose" scenario, you can sometimes dial up the laser power a little bit using trimmer pots on the driver's board. Also check for leaking surface-mount electrolytic caps as those can affect the power supply for the laser and/or spindle motor. - DVDs are even more prone to failure if the laser is marginal. Try a stamped DVD where possible as well on DVD drives before ruling them out. All in all, this struggle is real. It was happening as soon as 3 years after the drives were made back then and no surprise they're in this state now. I personally have a high tolerance for pain with regards to optical media and share a fascination with making them work even today. Give repair a shot, I think the Plextor drives in particular will be worth it, as well as that Creative drive with the IR window on the front. Those are special.
@@bitsundbolts My pleasure! One of the challenging things that a real optical drive solves without effort is CD Audio. I try to keep a stash of CD drives around both because I do still enjoy the tangible disc swapping, but also because CD Audio is tricky to get working in certain periods of DOS games, especially with current emulation options. (Once you get to Win98, something like daemonTools works for mounting images and piping audio to the sound card but in DOS, there isn't anything software-wise that I'm aware of yet which works with CD Audio.) I have had luck making BIN/CUE images of discs work with CD Audio using a ZuluSCSI device and a DAC Attack board. Great proof-of-concept for the days when finding working optical drives becomes difficult or prohibitively expensive.
Two months ago I also had struggles with a bunch of optical drives just like you did and, out of 8, I fixed 5 of them. 4 had problems with stretching belts which I fixed with boiling them in water for 5-10 minutes and/or swapping from non-working drives and just as well I cleaned and lubricated each one. The two had problems with the laser diode, which I just carefully cleaned. Now all 5 are working beautifully. One of them is a strange slot loading Panasonic SCSI drive which is now mainstay in my PII build.
Also sometimes on certain drives gears can crack at the base. agree with T3hBeowulf - Must admit how amusing I find the problem every one seem to have had of drives going in and out ad the slightest touch and having no time to get disc out!
@@bitsundbolts also get Nero CD Speed for testing real performance of drives that at least can read. You can test if head positioning is working OK, does the drive work stable at the whole range of capacity and speeds. And also if each drive can report C1/C2 errors and see how good the disc is actually reading.
Please keep that Creative Infra with the IR receiver at all costs! They were amazing devices, as they did weird driver stuff on the OS level to make them work (IR mouse anyone).
I wouldn't keep the Creative drives. They were very notorious for failure, especially for models ranging from 32X to 52X. Plextors and LiteOn's (no-name Plextor) were my go-to's, with Samsung being my close second. LG's were very slow for what they were.
@@PatientXero607 It's value is just because of the weird stuff it does, as far as I know it's the only example of its kind. Probably usual Creative garbage quality as regards the drive but it does something special with the ATAPI bus.
@@PatientXero607 Oh haha in 1997 or so i handled a whole bunch of Lite-On drives because they got praised in some magazine so a friendly retailer near me bought a big stack... so i grab one test it and it sort of works but it's louder than it should be, a little wobbly and weird with speedups/slowdowns and doesn't read difficult disk pressings... I grab 3 or 4 more randomly from the shelf and test them and they were all absolute garbage! Obviously i have since had Lite-On drives which were very good, they got a grip eventually. In turn i had several Samsung drives which worked very well for a time, i just no longer have them because they were superseded, not failed. Even the drive in my Dreamcast that's a Samsung built one and that still works. Oh and btw the same magazine a few pages further had an ad placed by the Lite-On distributor in our region. Lovely conflict of interest!
@@wernerviehhauser94 yes I agree also, one example off the top of my head is the Akai S3000xl, SCSI SSD etc inside but most still use the optical drive for convenience handling physical media.
@martinb.770 I remember a few years ago there was a guy on eBay, selling 2.88mb floppy drives for £100 each, like most obsolete hardware there would have been a time that they would be throwaways. Now worth even more, yes definitely worth saving equipment "for a rainy day"😁
that plexwriter 24/10/40A i used for 20+ years as my first optical drive (before then i was floppy only) and i kept it all the way through high school, college, several jobs, marriage, and the birth of my first child. right now other than being cleaned and swapping the band inside for the mechanism and using some silicone oil now and then, it's the thing that i write VCD's and picture albums for overseas family and make backups of everything. it's never failed me even with multiple OSs and only swapping to a PCIE controller a few years back. i miss plextor, they're gone now.
Maintaining the drives is pretty easy, you need some lithium grease which I think you have. Common problems are the paper ring on the spindle gets filthy or starts to degrade and sticks to discs which prevents the mechanism from working. I remove them and try to replace them with a very thin rubber o-ring. Also a lot of older drives will NOT read burned media at all.
Man that takes me back. Through sheer luck, I got my first ever CD drive returned to me a few years ago, a 2x Media Vision branded specimen with a super thick tray that came with (and connected to) my PAS16. 😍 I also still remember my first CD writer, an HP one that was also 2x and prohibitively expensive , esp. for me as a kid, but I made it work and (barely) broke even by copying tons of audio CDs day and night for my classmates, being the only game in town for years. Not much in it financially at the time yet because CD-Rs (Gold ones from Kodak) were not that much cheaper than regular CDs. They were of superb quality though, very compatible and probably still all perfectly readable to this day (unlike most of the cheap crap that came much later and on spindles instead of proper jewel cases, blech!). I ran that drive so much that it broke down within warranty and I was totally thrilled to be bumped up to (oddly) a Yamaha 4x4x16x that did not only work twice as fast but also could do RW. Man were those early Ricoh CD-RW discs expensive! And then they didn't even work properly in many devices including my portable CD player. Oh the disappointment! When CD burning became more accessible, I was so happy and proud that most people kept getting their copies from me, because I did not only stick to high quality, widely compatíble discs and slow write speeds for enhanced readability and longevity, but I was apparently also the only person far and wide that was capable of producing proper copies without clicks, pops and skips. All thanks to good drives, patience, WinDAC and a good amount of vigilance, as perfectionism dictates! 😄 Combined with L3enc, I was able to build a vast library of music and audio content of all kinds, even the teachers started approaching me at some point for audiobooks and such. 😂 Games too of course (and I was again the only one capable of exactly duplicating the copy protection thanks to superior drives and software), but to much lesser extent as gaming wasn't as mainstream yet. Regarding these drives, I owned and/or installed quite a few of these models in the PCs I built for others. Plextor was really the best (esp. for copy protected media), while it was still truly Plextor and not rebranded Panasonic as well. I personally wouldn't put much effort into them, but I'd be happy to watch. The dust might not be so bad and cleaning the lenses might actually help here for once, but if they've been sitting in the sun, all the belts, rubber parts and plastics are probably very degraded and replacements may be hard to get. There should be sources for better preserved drives...like my basement. 😅 I don''t know what the current market looks like, but I would expect better preserved and interesting drives to be considerably easier to find and less expensive to obtain than, say, 3dfx hardware, so it would make comparatively less sense to put effort into them?
My first CD drive was a 4x drive IIRC. I was in a similar situation to be one of the very few who had a CD writer. I do remember learning how to use CloneCD and ClonyXL/XXL to make perfect backups despite copy protections.
I had a 4x4x32 generic drive as my first CD burner in early 2000. It was very unreliable, had no buffer underrun protection and had a single light that flashed red when writing and green when reading. Eventually I got an LG 48x24x48x drive to replace it and managed to find some Memorex branded Ultra Speed CD-RW discs too!! Then in 2009 I got my first Blu-Ray writer (2x) and a 50GB BD-R DL disc. A friend of mine at work brought Avatar in on Blu-Ray and gave me 24 hours to copy it - which I did successfully under Windows XP and SlySoft AnyDVD - it took three hours to break the encryption and another three hours to write the movie but it worked! And XP "didn't support Blu-Ray" according to MS but hey VLC / MPC-BE could play the burnt disc just fine! Ah good times....
The CD drives were but I think the DVD drives were just relabeled drives from some other manufacturers. Not bad but not exceptional anymore. Like Lite-On. Pioneer made great DVD and later Blu-ray drives. All drives I still use heavily are from Pioneer.
I agree SCSI DVD are the best. I too had a slot load Pioneer SCSI. Only trouble was WinDVD ALWAYS complains that SCSI DVD drives don’t have “DMA MODE” on, which was dumb (they do). 🤦♂️
I have accumulated over the years dozens of CD/DVD drives. What I've found out is that 1X, 2X and 4X drives are 90% of the time in still good working condition. The later ones of higher speeds are hit and miss.
That should be up to about 12x; up to 12x to 16x drives were CLV which makes the electronics much simpler and the drive more reliable (but at 16x the outside edge gets really close to the speed of sound at full speed so less stable); from 20x+ they had to be CAV which makes the signal harder to decode and in my experience led to much cheaper and less reliable drives. Also why they capped out at about 52x max - you again get to the speed of sound at the edge of the CD and you physically cannot go/read faster without multiple heads.
@@postaldude2024 well, that very much also depended on the manufacturer of the CD, the drive and firmware used to burn the CD and the speed. Those are times I do not want to go back to.
with old opticals, i make it a point to clean and lube the whole assembly before i even try to test for function. replace any drive belts, etc, if they don't work, i'll poke it a little, but anything over an hour of work and it becomes parts. the plextor drives might be one/more of the 1:1 drives they released, which would allow you to make some really good copies, at least, if you can get them all sorted. and the creative drives are definitely worth it, if they can be revived. i try to revive all drives that come through my hands, but sadly, not all can be. the generic/common stuff becomes parts or recycled, the rare stuff gets kept unless i don't have room.
Plextor is also great if you want to use Alcohol 120% to make backups of copy protected games. I have ripped some CDs that just wouldn't rip on any other drive new or old.
Plextor 24/10/40A is definitely worth saving in my opinion. Saved one myself and I must admit that one is the best CD-RW drive I have had, although I bought it cheaply second hand for a secondary machine. Especially with PlexTools, it shines, Sanyo internals, quiet, fast enough and incredibly reliable, not picky about various suspicious quality CD-R/RWs of the time, as I remember.
I have many old drives that won't recognize a burnt CD or DVD. but work fine with oem disks. The first HP drive you showed, I have new in the box from 2002 . I have many Plextor drives. Back in the day ,before they could set them to read and write different formats. I used them to make (legal) copy's of CDG karaoke cd's.
My suggestions: 1) HP CD-Writer: It sounds a bit like the clamp needs some fixing. Most PC optical drives with a tray will lower the disc transport* to eject the tray. Hanging down from above the spindle motor, there's a plastic clamp with a magnetic disc in it. When you insert a disc and close the tray, the loading mechanism will raise the transport back up, and the spindle will go through the disc hub and mate with the clamp. Sometimes that clamp will be held by a circular ridge of metal in the case lid, other times it might be suspended from a brace that mounts to the sides of the drive's frame. The spindle motor should push it up just high enough to clear its mechanical support and spin freely. If it doesn't, then it makes an awful racket. 2) LG DVD-ROM: It might not be designed to read both DVD-R and DVD+R, so if you're going to use R/RW discs, make sure you at least have one of each. Better to keep a couple junk pressed CD- and DVD-ROM discs, though. With that many optical drives, it's a good chance at least one of them came with an old copy of TurboTax still loaded in there. 3) No notes. 4) Creative 32x: Creative never manufactured any drives. They sold a LOT of Matsushita (Panasonic) drives, as far back as 1x, IIRC, but most notably from the venerable MKE 2x drives. They all have that same look, except for the Quad Speed drives that also came in a variant with a flap on the front that folds down when the tray comes out. This drive might be toast, but it can be worth taking it apart and, if you're bold, recapping as well. I managed to save one with new caps. But usually if it doesn't work at all, it's a dead laser. 5) Plextor PX-504A: This was the end of the line for Plextor as we knew them. I don't remember if this model in particular was actually made by Plextor, or if it was after they started shipping Lite-On drives. Might just be a DVD-R/+R compatibility issue, but could also be a tired laser. Looks like it would serve well enough as a CD drive though, if that's all you can get out of it now. 6) Sony CDU-311: It is indeed an 8x drive. I actually just fixed up a couple of those! Out of three, I managed to cobble the parts together for two working ones. You're seeing the disc move because it's giving it a quick spin while trying and failing to detect the presence of a disc. Might work with a pressed disc, but it's probably just done. 7) Creative SCR-830: I don't recognize this drive's OEM. It's not a Matsushita drive. When the tray immediately retracts like that, it's often because the microswitch that detects the tray position isn't working right. Could be oxidation on the contacts, or it might just be in the wrong position -- especially likely if someone took it apart and didn't have the mech in the right state when putting the tray in. 8) Panasonic DVD-ROM: Very likely the belt is too weak to separate the spindle and clamp (magnetic, and the spindle might have a thin rubber layer applied to better grip the disc, and that can turn to goo), and/or the gears and transport lowering mechanism might have some dry lubricant that needs to be cleaned and refreshed. But it's probably not worth fixing if the laser is also dead. 9) Samsung CD-RW: Agree it's probably a bad belt. But, as you noted, this is from a period where these things were getting cheaper. Not a bad beater drive to have around, if you can fix the tray loading, but I wouldn't go to heroic lengths to fix that one. 10) Creative IR: ... Good luck with that one. I have done some plastic repairs, but that orange faceplate says this one's probably been left in direct sun for a while. It would probably take a whole other drive to replace the bezel, belts, and quite likely the laser too. So, a whole other drive that totally works.... 11) Plextor 24/10/40A: From when Plextor was on top of their game. Yes, the belt's probably gone. A few of mine from this era are too, and they take a couple of attempts to load the tray. 100% worth fixing.
In early 2000's i made a CD player to my car of one of the Creative ones which had Play and Skip buttons. Just soldered one 7805 regulator to the molex to get 5 volts from the 12 volt rail, and connected it to the radio AUX connector from the headphone jack. It worked pretty well even on bumpy roads. Only problem was that it started always from the first track after starting the car.
There could be compatibility issues with some old drives reading recorded media. This was a frequent reason to upgrade back in the day. Also I'd recommend getting an assortment of drive belts. That could be the cause of open and close issues as well as read issues. You should also get a synthetic oil bottle to lubricate the gears and moving parts, any oil for reel-to-reel tape decks would be fine.
Save them all if you think its worth your time. I'm sure the Toshiba Samsung Drive was the one they used in the original XBOX and that suffered the same rubber band issues (turned to jelly and sticks to the gearing / pullies, so potentially a simple first repair to get you started. Start with the potencially easy wins and do 2-3 per video maybe?
As someone who was on the Strike Commander Playtest team in the early 90's, every time I hear anything from the MT32 brings back some great memories. Especially the Strike Credits theme. Ahh Origin was great when we started to move from floppy to CD.
I'm not sure when I got Strike Commander, but it must have been 1995 or even later. I wonder how it was to be one of the first people playing that game!
@@bitsundbolts I was 18 at the time, it was great. I was working right along side some great people doing some really awesome things. But of course when you are play testing, it very rarely is a working product. One thing for sure, the QA teams have usually heard the opening sound effects and voices over 1000 times and know them by heart. Like me with Ultima 7, Privateer, Strike, Ultima 8.
One of my best drives back in time was the Yamaha CRW-F1. They ran very nice it was my first drive to have Buffer Underrun Protection when making CD back ups.
I am glad people have compiled tips on how to get the drives working again. While watching I was hoping for a second video since you weren't opening them to clean and repair them. I have had to open up my old drives before and even did the same with a floppy to get it working again. I never had to replace a belt, but I had a tray having issues and while I was in there I tried to relube all mechanisms. I had lithium at the time, but I probably would have preferred a silicone grease to last a long time and not be harsh on rubber. I never have replaced the belts, but these drives are probably at that point where they need new belts. When I was big into optical drives and burning, my go to was always plextor. I had used several brands before, but plextor often had the best reputation. They had black trays to avoid any light reflection inside the case, plus all of their other technology to stop burning incase the flow of data got interrupted. When it came to old computers, you could never prevent your computer from having to slow down due to another process starting up. You typically wanted your computer to do nothing else but burn and it was time consuming. So you let it do its thing. When it came to movies and music, I always let it verify the contents, but never had any errors pop up even when tested. Plextor would just stop the laser as soon as data stopped being available. Plextor is always worth saving. I looked up that drive and it rated highly for being the fastest at the time and the first plextor dvd burner. I don't know all the details of the other drives there, but that one is worth saving and probably should get some preventative maintenance. Plextors are worth saving for sure. They look the nicest and less run of the mill like every other one there.
in my highschool, we had to use ridiculously old educational CD-ROMs for Spanish class, one of the drives made the noise the first HP did and then POP! the cd exploded in the drive, there was even a shard of cd coming out of that students drive (they were ok thankfully). probably just a one in a million fluke but we were all on edge during that class after so hearing the noise in this brought back some traumatic memories 🤣 great video, love old tech
The noise sounds very much like a bearing has gone bad. That would make the spindle not rotate properly but wiggle around heavily. And at the very high rpm those drives can reach, it can totally shatter a disc
@@TSteffi oh that's cool, thank you for the explanation! I was always wondering if the disc was cracked or something but this makes a lot more sense! You solved and almost two decades long mystery thank you ❤️
@@summerlaverdure Back when I was in IT (90’s-00’s), I opened up a 48x cd drive that blew up a stamped cd. You could see the score marks in the metal drive housing where the cd ripped apart and impacted the steel wall. I found all the shards except for a powdered missing section. That likely was the point of impact on separation. The engineer said it sounded like someone threw sheet metal at a brick wall.
About SONY. Older CD-ROMs (before 1999-2000) usually do not read CD-R discs, as they need a lot of laser power. Check the stamped disc drive. This is probably true for early DVD-ROMs as well.
You're probably right. I already looked at the Sony drive. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, even with proper CDs from the factory. I did some research and it looks like those drives use the same laser assembly as the Sony PlayStation!
Those old Plextor drives are pretty awesome, I got one of the early DVD±R drives. They had a tool called GigaRec that could burn an out of spec CD with narrower tracks. It increased the CDR capacity by about 300MB and was still compatible with most drives. I mostly used it for mix CDs.
Oh, wow. I didn't know this was possible. I remember over-burning or something like that where you could go beyond the 650MB limit and maybe reach 680 to 720 MBs. But there was a big warning and I believe Nero Burning Rom had that option.
You have to use the Plex Tools program to write the disks. Looks like it's the PX-700 series DVD or "premium" branded CD burner. If I'm remembering correctly the CD drives could burn higher density.
unless it's a CD burner drive, any drives older than 2000 will likely not have diodes powerful enough to read CD-R and CD-RW discs as they're too 'dark'. this goes for CD players, too, a fact which I'm sure the RIAA enjoyed.
I had a 1996 8X toshiba drive. It was alright at reading CD-Rs, arguably even better than the more modern ones. No luck with CD-RWs though. Maybe the 1-2X drives using proprietary interfaces had issues with CD-Rs too but I never saw one.
mmmm. A few months ago I was doing the same thing as BuB, repairing/restoring and recovering several old optical drives (7 survived), but the disks I used to test them were CD-R and CD-RW and sometimes the reading failed and I attributed it to a failure of the drive. maybe was this you say
@@mikes989 Always test a drive with pressed discs. If it can't read a pressed disc, the drive has issues. CD-R compatibility varies. Some can read them fine, some can't. Others will struggle, but you might have good luck with particular types of CD-R that are burned in a good quality drive. Until you get to about the 16x to 24x era, it is definitely not a given that it'll be able to read any of them. CD-RW is a lost cause until you get to drives that were specifically made to read or write them -- and then only if the laser is in good condition. You can pretty much count on it NOT working on anything 8x and earlier. Don't even bother trying. (Well, don't get your hopes up that you can successfully install an OS from an RW disc, anyway. Experimenting just for fun is of course a different matter!)
The Plextor 24/10/40A is the GOAT. I have owned one for 20 years and will never get rid of it. I dont actively use it anymore but burnt a CD using it within the past year and it still works. I had a HP 7200 internal model before that which was great for making coasters.
Watching video later but I still have one rule. Whenever I see Plextor I grab it! Those were truly unbelievable when ripping scratched CD's and still are, if you can find working one and have PC with ATA-connector. Had 2 Plextors between 1998-2006, expensive but absolutely worth the price 😍
I still have my Plextor 12/10/32A around somewhere :) it's a great drive, some drives would introduce errors when reading and writing audio CDs with no pregaps between the tracks, but the Plextor would deal with these flawlessly :)
I have saved a couple of laptop DVD drives from old Lenovo laptops. Using an USB adapter which costs a couple of euros/dollars at Aliexpress, I can connect the drive to any computer, in case I need to read an old CD or DVD. Great for, for example, ripping old CDs to mp3 files. Also, these drives are extremely small, do not require much storage space.
I had one of those Plexwriters too, great drive. Also one of the HP CD Writer Plus drives I think it was my 1st writer cannot recall. Most fond memories of NEC 4X4 IDE Multispin CD-ROM Drive. 4 disc changer in one drive! Only 4X speed but amazing.
Those Plextor drives were lust worthy back in the day. I remember reading Maximum PC back in the day and they always used the top of the line Plextor drive in their annual dream PC build. I would love to see at least the Plextor drives fixed up.
11:14 Some of the Creative branded Matsushita (Panasonic) drives had an interface that LOOKED like IDE but was actually PROPRIETARY to Creative and bundled with some SoundBlaster cards. (I noticed the drive doesn't say IDE or ATAPI but "HOST INTERFACE".)This is before ATAPI was finalised and this /might/ be one of those drives.
You can have a drive configured as "slave" without anything else being "master". It's more like "channel" A and B or something. So you would not need to change configuration of Master/Slave if you don't have anything else on the same IDE cable.
@@stefanmisch5272 never seen any on such combinations. Technically, one is not before the other. The master/slave relationship as if one is over or before the other does not exist. They are just one of the two and the other of the two options.
@@GigAHerZ64 Not exactly true in all cases. If you read the interface spec, there's some coordination between the two during the drive ID phase. I don't remember exactly what it all was, and TBH it's more an issue with early IDE devices and controllers (486 era, e.g.,
I actually remember that CD-Writer Plus from Hewlett-Packard coming with a Dell Dimension 2400 that I had bought for real cheap (~$25) about 10 years ago to retro game on Windows 98SE, it connected directly to the SB Live! soundcard so that audio CDs could be played through the coaxial jack even while powered off. Neat little feature that I appreciated on portable laptops but with a desktop tower you might as well get a boombox
Ooo that LG drive was one I used to have. I was first to have DVD write drive in my area and used to burned stuff for everyone. Even played around with DVD-RAM discs :) . Dont know if its worth keeping, unless you find other DVD-RAM capable ones. AFAIK it also writes + or - discs.
Some creative drives are a bit critical in the IDE controller. I had a dead creative CD drive, so i thought, but connecting it to another motherboard made a difference. I was allready replacing capacitors but none of them showed leakage. Putting everything back and connected it to another PC and it worked.
Both of the Plextor drives and maybe the Toshiba (Samsung branded) one. They were the best in the 90's. We used the SCSI versions mainly for CD mastering back then. We also had a big rack of cheap IDEs (Panasonic,Lg,Sony etc) in the QA Dept. A spindle of manufactured discs would go through for a reality check. We used Doug Carson software for all the mastering and qa at the time.
As a technician, I have seen many optical drives issues. Some drives cannot read writable disks if they are not properly closed or with a compatible filesystem and TOC like Iso 9660 or joliet. Not all drives are compatible with El Torito specifications. With old DVD or CD media should work. The issues that you've found with Creative, plextor and HP drives are so common. Some can be fixed cleaning lenses, putting some lubricant in the metal bar to slide the lens and calibrating the door switch adjusting the gears. The most problematic could be replacing the rubber band. If the laser is damaged, then you can't do anything. The drive is dead.
The PlexWriter 24/10/40a is likely the best CD writer ever made, it's also one of the best drives for extracting from audio discs when used with EAC (Exact Audio Copy). This drive was before Plextor started making (or rebranding) run of the mill drives.
I have almost the same drive models as you, from years of gathering old hardware! I still love using them to install DOS6x/Win3x/9x/Me/NT4/2K/XP from my custom AIO DVD, since many old hardware either doesn't support booting from USB, or has problems/issues that I'm not interested in solving. I usually clean the laser with isopropyl alcohol, replace the belts when needed, and clean/lubricate the plastic cog wheels. AS a sanity check, I also make an ISO from a CD/DVD to check the final CRC and make sure it's correctly reading the media.
I had that HP Writer plus, and that plextor cdrw. One of those creatives too, in an external bay, connected via i think an external SCSI connector to the sound card. Man, this takes me back..
Occasionally it's a connection for an eject button to be used with cases that have custom-shaped bays. I've seen this on a relatively modern prebuilt. I don't know why they didn't use a plastic lever to relocate the button like everybody else did.
I have a negative view of floppies. They were slow, loud and unreliable. I had (past tense) a positive view of optical. They were fast, almost quiet, very reliable. But..........these days they are inconvenient. I do admit there was a massive leap forward thanks to them, but you can pretty much find ways around using them these days.
If it's the only device on the IDE channel, it doesn't matter if it's Master or Slave... it only matters if you have more than one device, or have Cable-Select chosen (then the position on the cable decides)
Also check if there is a firmware update available. Remember my first pioneer dvd drive was terrible at first, but excellent after update. Remember I had all those plextor drives back in the day. Best cd-rw drives.
The Creative 32X drive was a popular upgrade for the Doctor V64 from Bung Enterprises. That’s because the V64 PSU’s 12 volt rail was weak and Matsushita-made drives did not require a lot of amps to spin up compared to other competing high-speed drives. Everyone knew that Creative CD-ROM drives were Matsushita. Most V64s shipped with an unbranded 8x Matsushita-made drive but later units shipped with a 24x TEAC slimline laptop drive inside a 5.25” adapter… because of course they had lower power requirements. The V64 is not compatible with many CD-ROMs and I’ve never found a DVD-ROM drive that works. I’ve also found Apple and IBM-branded Matsushita 8x drives. After hunting for years to restore my V64 units, I recognize them from their bezels alone. ;)
The measure of any optical drive back in the day was its ability to work with tools like ‘Blindwrite’ et al. to copy ‘protected’ media. That was a very active ‘scene’ at the time and well worth exploring. 😉
The Creative Infra is definitely the coolest. I had one, but I forget exactly which model. Even if it doesn't read discs, the ability to control things in Windows with the remote is handy! I even played CDs remotely without using a CD player program. Just make sure the CD audio input (analog) for the sound card is enabled.
Regarding the LG GSA-4082B , Some older DVD Drives would only recognize certain types of DVD's. I remember back in the day purchasing -R DVD's and plus R DVD's.
@@bitsundbolts I actually still have some rare 900mb CD-R's. Yes they did exist. I would purchase them for the purpose of putting movies on a CD-R a long time ago. When I first got the CD-R's they were silver. Now they look gold but it's actually yellowing of the plastic with age.
In my opinion every CD reader below 24x is worth saving, they're becoming rare these days. The slower the better actually, that's less noise and, what's even more important, less vibrations which aren't what old CD media like. Personally I use a quad speed CD-ROM in my main Pentium II retro PC (albeit something between 16x and 24x would be more period correct) and 6x in the other one. Their operation is extremely smooth and quiet. And before anyone mentions how slow they are... I don't care that installing a two CD game takes 10 minutes, after all I install it only once. Hell, when I find time to have some retro computing fun I'm not in a hurry anyway ;)
the speed doesn't really matter that much when installing yeah, it matters more if you're playing off the cd with seek and such. we'd use 4x and 8x drives for many years after they were "obsolete" anyway back in the day, worked fine so why spend the upgrade budget on one.
We have CDbeQuiet now. A lot of noise is just air noise from the gap between the front lid and the front casing. It can be sealed with a thin strip of foam. Some nicer drives from the fast drive era had it from the factory, black foam rubber in a groove. The groove is usually there even if the sealing has been spared.
@@lasskinn474 - my experience is completely the opposite: while installing slightly 'bigger' games such as Blade Runner requires some patience, from that point on it's completely fine, seek and read times are totally acceptable for 1995-2000 games, no stuttering or freezing whatsoever 👍
And also fast drives needs a few sec to spin up and stabilize before responding, causing some (older) games to de-sync cinematics, voiceovers, or maybe loading error(?) in some parts. Slow drives can respond almost instantly.
One of the first things I test with my CD/DVD drives (besides whether they read CDs or not) is to see if their speed can be controlled with Nero DriveSpeed. This can make them so much quieter and usable and still plenty fast.
Most of the drives were UDMA mode 2 (PATA33 for all the kids in here), the first Creative drive was UDMA mode 4 (PATA66). But there also some drives detected as CDROM mode 2, meaning pre-ATA and since they worked with a regular IDE controller they should ATAPI compatible drives. I would look into these, since they are getting more rare.
As I watch this - I’m reminded that there was a lot of variability in what drives would read what media. i.e. cdrom drive might read a CD-R, or CD-RW, or might read one or the other but not both. Same for DVD, but with more possible problems, i.e. DVD drive might read a cdrom fine, and a video dvd fine, but not a data dvd. Or, might do those others, but not read a DVD-RW/RO, or those weird DVD-RW+ discs. My last drives were blu-ray burner slot loaders, and those were pretty awesome to read all other format discs, except for the micro or mini-cd/dvd discs.
That creative drive with remote has a special x1 mode that allows you to read the cd in the first pass and on average be faster than x52 speed. A channel called cathode ray dude has a video on it. It is pretty cool.
In stuck drives you have to replace tray belt. In automatically closed drives you have to clean open detector (switch inside). When drive doesn't read discs, try to clean the laser by IPA liquid or lubricate laser's head cogwheels or something like that.
Old drives, like pre-1997 ones won’t necessarily read CD-R discs, not to mention RW ones. Also, DVD is 1997 thing if I recall correctly. Very good video, brings up memories and various emotions for an once optical lover like me 😂
I did the same with my drives recently. I have 5 fully functional plextor drives, one of them struggling to open the tray sometimes. Other 2 LG drives, one of them wasn't reading at all and other one just died while I was using it. I think I'll buy a few more IDE drives just in case.
To be fair the first 2 creative drives are just rebranded only that last one with the mode button and infrared is a real creative drive and this one definetly should be saved just for his unique features i would try to fix all of those who seems to be made in decent quality for now IDE drives are still common and easy to find if needed, but who know if that will still be the case in 10 years
That samsung drive at 31:00 is the same drive that I had back around 2006 that exploded a cd by spinning it extremely fast. Mythbusters later busted the myth, but my 2 kids who were mad they couldn't play Incredibles on PC anymore would argue otherwise.
Plextor for the win. In earlier video you had an plextor 716a driver folder in your're desktop. I still have my 716-a sata drive for my small cd/dvd usa of today. 716-a was my best optical drive. There is no working disc that it can not read. it handels difficult over lengt cd's etc with ease and these copy protected discs aswell.
I love optical drives and have quite the collection. All of the Creative drives were made by Matushita and they all open and close fast and hard, even when brand new. Oh, some tips... When testing cdr/dvdr, you should try to use discs manufactured closer to when the drive was. Plenty of newer disc media use cheaper modern dyes that dont play well with older drives. Or you can track down the good modern optical media like Taiyo Yuden etc. (made in Japan) But can be pretty expensive. Its rarely a 'works or not' situation, there is almost always a way to bring OD's back to life. Also, when the drive wont open, press eject and knock on the front top with your knuckles a bit on the harder side and it will pop open. You also dont need to set them to 'master' if youre only using one drive... 'slave' should be fine. Plextor were my favorites.
I remember buying an HP drive just like that 8200 around 1999 for around $300 usd when I was a broke high school kid and put in my HP tower with a 233mhz cpu and 32mb of ram.
I killed the 8x Crative drive by just playing the first two Tomb Raider games. It felt like it was constantly running out of buffer and sounded like a overclocked Dreamcast drive. Somewhat like if you did use your Dreamcast as a portable cd player while jogging.
My own memories about optical drives never endet. Hopefully I have collected enough drives in the basement, to have enough for the rest of my life ^^ From my collectors POV, the Creative drives are the most important drives. Just from the rareness factor. I personally love the cheap Mitsumi drives from the mid 90s. The double speed up to 8x speeds. The noise of the clunky loading mechanism is 90s feeling pure to me.
Definitely the Plex drives were always a cut above, they and the TEAC SCSI drives were always great workhorse, burned thousands of discs with these two. That "Ultima" is an Artec drive, these were Ricoh-based units made in Taiwan and not bad either generally.
This would have been a good application to have some AOL CDs on hand so you could have a mastered CD to test without risking something actually valuable like the Windows 98 disc.
Back in the day, i bought a brand new similar hp cdrw, 9100, for... reasons. Good old days. I remember nero burning rom had some testing features. Oh and i also had that awesome slot-in pioneer. Worked great for years, then, one day, it made a cd or dvd into a million pieces inside it :D
Back in the day there were all kinds of compatibility problems with blank media some brands would work on specific drives and not work on others. The drives that don't read them are not necessarily defective. I would concentrate on using original stamped disks to test the drives.
@40:30 Plextor was known for making drives that were double the budget of others, in part because of being as reliable as a tank, and for being built like a tank. They never opened any quicker than that. Good to know they actually are as reliable as they were proclaimed to be - but I never had the budget to buy one when it was still interesting. I'd save the Plexwriter, the Creative drives, and all DVD writers among them with a preference to the Lightscribe ones if there are any. The rest were made to a budget and likely to break soon after you fix them.
As someone who used drives such as the ones you used, back when they first appeared, I can say your panic at the HP's noise was unnecessary; some drives simply were that noisy when they spun up to full speed, especially if they were early examples of high speed (32x, 52x). Especially HP which had sponsorship agreements in place, and didn't have to be "good", or have quality of life improvements like quiet operation. If it read the disks, it was good, noise notwithstanding.
Even if you can't fix some of the drives, you could still try to sell them as a lot for parts. Even just the faceplates are worth keeping for some of them.
It sounds like the HP has lost the plastic holder on the top of the drive. This way the CD is not held and starts wobble in there. But I'm impressed how good it reads the autorun, maybe it is a 3D print job, easy to fix or the part is just misplaced inside?
And ClonyXL/XXL. Those Plexor drives were great at creating backups of 'protected' CDs. I want to cover some of the old copy protections from those days.
Saved the most interesting one for last. Oh, you sneaky TH-camr, you! 😂 The Creative Infra had two read lasers to get the 60x speed, if I remember correctly. Interesting.
My first CD burner was a retail-packaged HP CD-Writer Plus 8100i (“i” for internal) from 1998 with the same bezel swoosh. I actually still have the packaging and manual. It is a rebadged Sony CRX-100, which I recall because I had to trick it into accepting updated Sony firmware so that I could burn 80 minute CD-R discs. Yes, it’s so old that 700MB wasn’t even the standard yet. I couldn’t even burn Disc-At-Once. It was one of the earliest consumer CD-RW drives so it could only burn those at 2x (8x read). CD-R wasn’t much better at 4x write speed… and the fastest it could read any disc was 24x in an era when most standard CD-ROM drives were 32x or higher. I suffered with that drive a very long time. :)
This might be sacrilege but there are a number of fun projects that can be made with the rods and motors from desktop CD/DVD drives. If they're not particularly valuable drives for some reason for some esoteric purpose, maybe they could be used for CNC plotters or laser engravers?
Every drive that can be saved is worth saving, in my opinion. Especially as they are in my experience the most unreliable (relatively) modern PC component behind cheap power supplies, so having a few spare drives is always good.
These drives are absolutely interesting and IMHO, they are worth saving where possible.
Common issues:
* Tray belts stretch and dry out which causes belts to slip and the tray to get stuck. Eject mechanism has to slide and drop the whole laser assembly and then push the tray out. Plastic on plastic sliding gets harder as grease dries up and plastics become brittle and rough.
- Fix 1: replace the belt (usually pretty easy once the cover is removed, some let you replace them from the slot in the tray.)
- Fix 2: Disassemble and lubricate the sliding mechanism, tray slides and laser mechanism.
- Fix 3: Add a little bit of tape to the magnetic clasp on the CD topper in the lid of the drive... Sometimes those can bind quite tightly to the motor hub and get a tray stuck too. A couple layers of cello-tape can help pull the assembly away from the CD.
* CDs won't read:
- This is often a combination of several issues. CD-Rs are notorious for being "too dark" for an aging laser diode and especially true for older CD drives. Test with stamped CDs were possible to ensure it isn't just a "CD-R" issue.
- Laser power has degraded. In a "nothing to lose" scenario, you can sometimes dial up the laser power a little bit using trimmer pots on the driver's board. Also check for leaking surface-mount electrolytic caps as those can affect the power supply for the laser and/or spindle motor.
- DVDs are even more prone to failure if the laser is marginal. Try a stamped DVD where possible as well on DVD drives before ruling them out.
All in all, this struggle is real. It was happening as soon as 3 years after the drives were made back then and no surprise they're in this state now. I personally have a high tolerance for pain with regards to optical media and share a fascination with making them work even today. Give repair a shot, I think the Plextor drives in particular will be worth it, as well as that Creative drive with the IR window on the front. Those are special.
Oh wow! Thank you for this extensive reply! I will read up on some techniques. Hopefully, I will be able to save a few of those drives.
@@bitsundbolts My pleasure!
One of the challenging things that a real optical drive solves without effort is CD Audio. I try to keep a stash of CD drives around both because I do still enjoy the tangible disc swapping, but also because CD Audio is tricky to get working in certain periods of DOS games, especially with current emulation options. (Once you get to Win98, something like daemonTools works for mounting images and piping audio to the sound card but in DOS, there isn't anything software-wise that I'm aware of yet which works with CD Audio.)
I have had luck making BIN/CUE images of discs work with CD Audio using a ZuluSCSI device and a DAC Attack board. Great proof-of-concept for the days when finding working optical drives becomes difficult or prohibitively expensive.
Two months ago I also had struggles with a bunch of optical drives just like you did and, out of 8, I fixed 5 of them. 4 had problems with stretching belts which I fixed with boiling them in water for 5-10 minutes and/or swapping from non-working drives and just as well I cleaned and lubricated each one. The two had problems with the laser diode, which I just carefully cleaned. Now all 5 are working beautifully. One of them is a strange slot loading Panasonic SCSI drive which is now mainstay in my PII build.
Also sometimes on certain drives gears can crack at the base. agree with T3hBeowulf - Must admit how amusing I find the problem every one seem to have had of drives going in and out ad the slightest touch and having no time to get disc out!
@@bitsundbolts also get Nero CD Speed for testing real performance of drives that at least can read. You can test if head positioning is working OK, does the drive work stable at the whole range of capacity and speeds. And also if each drive can report C1/C2 errors and see how good the disc is actually reading.
Please keep that Creative Infra with the IR receiver at all costs! They were amazing devices, as they did weird driver stuff on the OS level to make them work (IR mouse anyone).
Cathode Ray Dude made a great video showing its features
jeah
I wouldn't keep the Creative drives. They were very notorious for failure, especially for models ranging from 32X to 52X. Plextors and LiteOn's (no-name Plextor) were my go-to's, with Samsung being my close second. LG's were very slow for what they were.
@@PatientXero607 It's value is just because of the weird stuff it does, as far as I know it's the only example of its kind. Probably usual Creative garbage quality as regards the drive but it does something special with the ATAPI bus.
@@PatientXero607 Oh haha in 1997 or so i handled a whole bunch of Lite-On drives because they got praised in some magazine so a friendly retailer near me bought a big stack... so i grab one test it and it sort of works but it's louder than it should be, a little wobbly and weird with speedups/slowdowns and doesn't read difficult disk pressings... I grab 3 or 4 more randomly from the shelf and test them and they were all absolute garbage! Obviously i have since had Lite-On drives which were very good, they got a grip eventually.
In turn i had several Samsung drives which worked very well for a time, i just no longer have them because they were superseded, not failed. Even the drive in my Dreamcast that's a Samsung built one and that still works.
Oh and btw the same magazine a few pages further had an ad placed by the Lite-On distributor in our region. Lovely conflict of interest!
Any SCSI optical drives are worth saving, they're sure to become more and more valuable. There's equipment (non pc etc)that still use these.
True, but SCSI is so damn flexible that you can even get or make SCSI-to-coffemaker adapters
@@wernerviehhauser94 yes I agree also, one example off the top of my head is the Akai S3000xl, SCSI SSD etc inside but most still use the optical drive for convenience handling physical media.
Especially those that also could be jumpered to work with 512byte sectors instead of 2k, which was needed for some Unix workstations.
@martinb.770 I remember a few years ago there was a guy on eBay, selling 2.88mb floppy drives for £100 each, like most obsolete hardware there would have been a time that they would be throwaways. Now worth even more, yes definitely worth saving equipment "for a rainy day"😁
that plexwriter 24/10/40A i used for 20+ years as my first optical drive (before then i was floppy only) and i kept it all the way through high school, college, several jobs, marriage, and the birth of my first child. right now other than being cleaned and swapping the band inside for the mechanism and using some silicone oil now and then, it's the thing that i write VCD's and picture albums for overseas family and make backups of everything. it's never failed me even with multiple OSs and only swapping to a PCIE controller a few years back. i miss plextor, they're gone now.
Agree with the others, also you must absolutely save and preserve the Plextors, those are very special drives.
Creative CD Drive with Remote Control is nice, also the Plexwriter.
Maintaining the drives is pretty easy, you need some lithium grease which I think you have. Common problems are the paper ring on the spindle gets filthy or starts to degrade and sticks to discs which prevents the mechanism from working. I remove them and try to replace them with a very thin rubber o-ring. Also a lot of older drives will NOT read burned media at all.
Man that takes me back. Through sheer luck, I got my first ever CD drive returned to me a few years ago, a 2x Media Vision branded specimen with a super thick tray that came with (and connected to) my PAS16. 😍 I also still remember my first CD writer, an HP one that was also 2x and prohibitively expensive , esp. for me as a kid, but I made it work and (barely) broke even by copying tons of audio CDs day and night for my classmates, being the only game in town for years. Not much in it financially at the time yet because CD-Rs (Gold ones from Kodak) were not that much cheaper than regular CDs. They were of superb quality though, very compatible and probably still all perfectly readable to this day (unlike most of the cheap crap that came much later and on spindles instead of proper jewel cases, blech!). I ran that drive so much that it broke down within warranty and I was totally thrilled to be bumped up to (oddly) a Yamaha 4x4x16x that did not only work twice as fast but also could do RW. Man were those early Ricoh CD-RW discs expensive! And then they didn't even work properly in many devices including my portable CD player. Oh the disappointment!
When CD burning became more accessible, I was so happy and proud that most people kept getting their copies from me, because I did not only stick to high quality, widely compatíble discs and slow write speeds for enhanced readability and longevity, but I was apparently also the only person far and wide that was capable of producing proper copies without clicks, pops and skips. All thanks to good drives, patience, WinDAC and a good amount of vigilance, as perfectionism dictates! 😄 Combined with L3enc, I was able to build a vast library of music and audio content of all kinds, even the teachers started approaching me at some point for audiobooks and such. 😂 Games too of course (and I was again the only one capable of exactly duplicating the copy protection thanks to superior drives and software), but to much lesser extent as gaming wasn't as mainstream yet.
Regarding these drives, I owned and/or installed quite a few of these models in the PCs I built for others. Plextor was really the best (esp. for copy protected media), while it was still truly Plextor and not rebranded Panasonic as well. I personally wouldn't put much effort into them, but I'd be happy to watch. The dust might not be so bad and cleaning the lenses might actually help here for once, but if they've been sitting in the sun, all the belts, rubber parts and plastics are probably very degraded and replacements may be hard to get. There should be sources for better preserved drives...like my basement. 😅 I don''t know what the current market looks like, but I would expect better preserved and interesting drives to be considerably easier to find and less expensive to obtain than, say, 3dfx hardware, so it would make comparatively less sense to put effort into them?
My first CD drive was a 4x drive IIRC. I was in a similar situation to be one of the very few who had a CD writer. I do remember learning how to use CloneCD and ClonyXL/XXL to make perfect backups despite copy protections.
I had a 4x4x32 generic drive as my first CD burner in early 2000. It was very unreliable, had no buffer underrun protection and had a single light that flashed red when writing and green when reading. Eventually I got an LG 48x24x48x drive to replace it and managed to find some Memorex branded Ultra Speed CD-RW discs too!! Then in 2009 I got my first Blu-Ray writer (2x) and a 50GB BD-R DL disc. A friend of mine at work brought Avatar in on Blu-Ray and gave me 24 hours to copy it - which I did successfully under Windows XP and SlySoft AnyDVD - it took three hours to break the encryption and another three hours to write the movie but it worked! And XP "didn't support Blu-Ray" according to MS but hey VLC / MPC-BE could play the burnt disc just fine! Ah good times....
Plextor was high end back then, I always save them
The CD drives were but I think the DVD drives were just relabeled drives from some other manufacturers. Not bad but not exceptional anymore. Like Lite-On. Pioneer made great DVD and later Blu-ray drives. All drives I still use heavily are from Pioneer.
more recent one were indeed cheaper. If I were to save one here, it would be the older plextor.
@@yanndiy Yes that was from the CD burning era, still have a few plextor cd burners here that look like the older one in the video
@@gentuxable Makes sense, my first pc dvd was a pioneer slot load, still have it and still works
Anything that's Plextor is worth saving including Pioneer slot loaded DVD drives. SCSI drives are rarer and also worth saving.
I agree SCSI DVD are the best. I too had a slot load Pioneer SCSI.
Only trouble was WinDVD ALWAYS complains that SCSI DVD drives don’t have “DMA MODE” on, which was dumb (they do). 🤦♂️
I have accumulated over the years dozens of CD/DVD drives. What I've found out is that 1X, 2X and 4X drives are 90% of the time in still good working condition. The later ones of higher speeds are hit and miss.
Older drives did not support multiread spec which means they cannot read re-writable media which in turn destroys drives over time with use.
That should be up to about 12x; up to 12x to 16x drives were CLV which makes the electronics much simpler and the drive more reliable (but at 16x the outside edge gets really close to the speed of sound at full speed so less stable); from 20x+ they had to be CAV which makes the signal harder to decode and in my experience led to much cheaper and less reliable drives. Also why they capped out at about 52x max - you again get to the speed of sound at the edge of the CD and you physically cannot go/read faster without multiple heads.
many old drives before 2000 cant read cd-r, just stamped cds
or need very low cd-r writespeed burning
@@postaldude2024 well, that very much also depended on the manufacturer of the CD, the drive and firmware used to burn the CD and the speed. Those are times I do not want to go back to.
I was waiting for this comment. He has to test with a pressed, known good working CD
with old opticals, i make it a point to clean and lube the whole assembly before i even try to test for function. replace any drive belts, etc, if they don't work, i'll poke it a little, but anything over an hour of work and it becomes parts.
the plextor drives might be one/more of the 1:1 drives they released, which would allow you to make some really good copies, at least, if you can get them all sorted.
and the creative drives are definitely worth it, if they can be revived.
i try to revive all drives that come through my hands, but sadly, not all can be. the generic/common stuff becomes parts or recycled, the rare stuff gets kept unless i don't have room.
Plextor is also great if you want to use Alcohol 120% to make backups of copy protected games. I have ripped some CDs that just wouldn't rip on any other drive new or old.
I very much hope to see a CD-Rom drive repairathon in the future ;)
Plextor 24/10/40A is definitely worth saving in my opinion. Saved one myself and I must admit that one is the best CD-RW drive I have had, although I bought it cheaply second hand for a secondary machine. Especially with PlexTools, it shines, Sanyo internals, quiet, fast enough and incredibly reliable, not picky about various suspicious quality CD-R/RWs of the time, as I remember.
I have many old drives that won't recognize a burnt CD or DVD. but work fine with oem disks. The first HP drive you showed, I have new in the box from 2002 . I have many Plextor drives. Back in the day ,before they could set them to read and write different formats. I used them to make (legal) copy's of CDG karaoke cd's.
My suggestions:
1) HP CD-Writer: It sounds a bit like the clamp needs some fixing. Most PC optical drives with a tray will lower the disc transport* to eject the tray. Hanging down from above the spindle motor, there's a plastic clamp with a magnetic disc in it. When you insert a disc and close the tray, the loading mechanism will raise the transport back up, and the spindle will go through the disc hub and mate with the clamp. Sometimes that clamp will be held by a circular ridge of metal in the case lid, other times it might be suspended from a brace that mounts to the sides of the drive's frame. The spindle motor should push it up just high enough to clear its mechanical support and spin freely. If it doesn't, then it makes an awful racket.
2) LG DVD-ROM: It might not be designed to read both DVD-R and DVD+R, so if you're going to use R/RW discs, make sure you at least have one of each. Better to keep a couple junk pressed CD- and DVD-ROM discs, though. With that many optical drives, it's a good chance at least one of them came with an old copy of TurboTax still loaded in there.
3) No notes.
4) Creative 32x: Creative never manufactured any drives. They sold a LOT of Matsushita (Panasonic) drives, as far back as 1x, IIRC, but most notably from the venerable MKE 2x drives. They all have that same look, except for the Quad Speed drives that also came in a variant with a flap on the front that folds down when the tray comes out. This drive might be toast, but it can be worth taking it apart and, if you're bold, recapping as well. I managed to save one with new caps. But usually if it doesn't work at all, it's a dead laser.
5) Plextor PX-504A: This was the end of the line for Plextor as we knew them. I don't remember if this model in particular was actually made by Plextor, or if it was after they started shipping Lite-On drives. Might just be a DVD-R/+R compatibility issue, but could also be a tired laser. Looks like it would serve well enough as a CD drive though, if that's all you can get out of it now.
6) Sony CDU-311: It is indeed an 8x drive. I actually just fixed up a couple of those! Out of three, I managed to cobble the parts together for two working ones. You're seeing the disc move because it's giving it a quick spin while trying and failing to detect the presence of a disc. Might work with a pressed disc, but it's probably just done.
7) Creative SCR-830: I don't recognize this drive's OEM. It's not a Matsushita drive. When the tray immediately retracts like that, it's often because the microswitch that detects the tray position isn't working right. Could be oxidation on the contacts, or it might just be in the wrong position -- especially likely if someone took it apart and didn't have the mech in the right state when putting the tray in.
8) Panasonic DVD-ROM: Very likely the belt is too weak to separate the spindle and clamp (magnetic, and the spindle might have a thin rubber layer applied to better grip the disc, and that can turn to goo), and/or the gears and transport lowering mechanism might have some dry lubricant that needs to be cleaned and refreshed. But it's probably not worth fixing if the laser is also dead.
9) Samsung CD-RW: Agree it's probably a bad belt. But, as you noted, this is from a period where these things were getting cheaper. Not a bad beater drive to have around, if you can fix the tray loading, but I wouldn't go to heroic lengths to fix that one.
10) Creative IR: ... Good luck with that one. I have done some plastic repairs, but that orange faceplate says this one's probably been left in direct sun for a while. It would probably take a whole other drive to replace the bezel, belts, and quite likely the laser too. So, a whole other drive that totally works....
11) Plextor 24/10/40A: From when Plextor was on top of their game. Yes, the belt's probably gone. A few of mine from this era are too, and they take a couple of attempts to load the tray. 100% worth fixing.
Thank you very much for all this information! I'll probably use your comment as a guide to fix those drives! Thanks!
In early 2000's i made a CD player to my car of one of the Creative ones which had Play and Skip buttons. Just soldered one 7805 regulator to the molex to get 5 volts from the 12 volt rail, and connected it to the radio AUX connector from the headphone jack. It worked pretty well even on bumpy roads. Only problem was that it started always from the first track after starting the car.
There could be compatibility issues with some old drives reading recorded media. This was a frequent reason to upgrade back in the day. Also I'd recommend getting an assortment of drive belts. That could be the cause of open and close issues as well as read issues. You should also get a synthetic oil bottle to lubricate the gears and moving parts, any oil for reel-to-reel tape decks would be fine.
Save them all if you think its worth your time. I'm sure the Toshiba Samsung Drive was the one they used in the original XBOX and that suffered the same rubber band issues (turned to jelly and sticks to the gearing / pullies, so potentially a simple first repair to get you started. Start with the potencially easy wins and do 2-3 per video maybe?
Sounds like a great plan! That was also my thinking. Starting easy and then take on the bigger challenges.
Found that HP one new it box at a yard sale a couple years back, gave it to someone that could use it
As someone who was on the Strike Commander Playtest team in the early 90's, every time I hear anything from the MT32 brings back some great memories. Especially the Strike Credits theme. Ahh Origin was great when we started to move from floppy to CD.
I'm not sure when I got Strike Commander, but it must have been 1995 or even later. I wonder how it was to be one of the first people playing that game!
@@bitsundbolts I was 18 at the time, it was great. I was working right along side some great people doing some really awesome things. But of course when you are play testing, it very rarely is a working product. One thing for sure, the QA teams have usually heard the opening sound effects and voices over 1000 times and know them by heart. Like me with Ultima 7, Privateer, Strike, Ultima 8.
@@andrewhofmann5453you have been a thorn in my side for far too long, Avatar...
30:54 TSSTcorp is Toshiba-Samsung STorage Corporation.
29:57 the T is Technology
close... but no cigar ;)
One of my best drives back in time was the Yamaha CRW-F1. They ran very nice it was my first drive to have Buffer Underrun Protection when making CD back ups.
I am glad people have compiled tips on how to get the drives working again. While watching I was hoping for a second video since you weren't opening them to clean and repair them.
I have had to open up my old drives before and even did the same with a floppy to get it working again. I never had to replace a belt, but I had a tray having issues and while I was in there I tried to relube all mechanisms. I had lithium at the time, but I probably would have preferred a silicone grease to last a long time and not be harsh on rubber. I never have replaced the belts, but these drives are probably at that point where they need new belts.
When I was big into optical drives and burning, my go to was always plextor. I had used several brands before, but plextor often had the best reputation. They had black trays to avoid any light reflection inside the case, plus all of their other technology to stop burning incase the flow of data got interrupted. When it came to old computers, you could never prevent your computer from having to slow down due to another process starting up. You typically wanted your computer to do nothing else but burn and it was time consuming. So you let it do its thing. When it came to movies and music, I always let it verify the contents, but never had any errors pop up even when tested. Plextor would just stop the laser as soon as data stopped being available. Plextor is always worth saving. I looked up that drive and it rated highly for being the fastest at the time and the first plextor dvd burner. I don't know all the details of the other drives there, but that one is worth saving and probably should get some preventative maintenance. Plextors are worth saving for sure. They look the nicest and less run of the mill like every other one there.
Teac were the plain, non-descript drives the shop I worked at used, and they were always my favorite.
in my highschool, we had to use ridiculously old educational CD-ROMs for Spanish class, one of the drives made the noise the first HP did and then POP! the cd exploded in the drive, there was even a shard of cd coming out of that students drive (they were ok thankfully). probably just a one in a million fluke but we were all on edge during that class after so hearing the noise in this brought back some traumatic memories 🤣 great video, love old tech
also does windows 98 even read dvds? should try a more modern os for that
The noise sounds very much like a bearing has gone bad. That would make the spindle not rotate properly but wiggle around heavily.
And at the very high rpm those drives can reach, it can totally shatter a disc
@@TSteffi oh that's cool, thank you for the explanation! I was always wondering if the disc was cracked or something but this makes a lot more sense! You solved and almost two decades long mystery thank you ❤️
@@summerlaverdure
Back when I was in IT (90’s-00’s), I opened up a 48x cd drive that blew up a stamped cd. You could see the score marks in the metal drive housing where the cd ripped apart and impacted the steel wall. I found all the shards except for a powdered missing section. That likely was the point of impact on separation.
The engineer said it sounded like someone threw sheet metal at a brick wall.
@@glenncaughey5044 damn 0_0 its like a tiny grenade!
About SONY. Older CD-ROMs (before 1999-2000) usually do not read CD-R discs, as they need a lot of laser power. Check the stamped disc drive. This is probably true for early DVD-ROMs as well.
You're probably right. I already looked at the Sony drive. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, even with proper CDs from the factory. I did some research and it looks like those drives use the same laser assembly as the Sony PlayStation!
Those old Plextor drives are pretty awesome, I got one of the early DVD±R drives. They had a tool called GigaRec that could burn an out of spec CD with narrower tracks. It increased the CDR capacity by about 300MB and was still compatible with most drives. I mostly used it for mix CDs.
Oh, wow. I didn't know this was possible. I remember over-burning or something like that where you could go beyond the 650MB limit and maybe reach 680 to 720 MBs. But there was a big warning and I believe Nero Burning Rom had that option.
You have to use the Plex Tools program to write the disks. Looks like it's the PX-700 series DVD or "premium" branded CD burner. If I'm remembering correctly the CD drives could burn higher density.
unless it's a CD burner drive, any drives older than 2000 will likely not have diodes powerful enough to read CD-R and CD-RW discs as they're too 'dark'. this goes for CD players, too, a fact which I'm sure the RIAA enjoyed.
I had a 1996 8X toshiba drive. It was alright at reading CD-Rs, arguably even better than the more modern ones. No luck with CD-RWs though. Maybe the 1-2X drives using proprietary interfaces had issues with CD-Rs too but I never saw one.
mmmm. A few months ago I was doing the same thing as BuB, repairing/restoring and recovering several old optical drives (7 survived), but the disks I used to test them were CD-R and CD-RW and sometimes the reading failed and I attributed it to a failure of the drive. maybe was this you say
@@mikes989 Always test a drive with pressed discs. If it can't read a pressed disc, the drive has issues.
CD-R compatibility varies. Some can read them fine, some can't. Others will struggle, but you might have good luck with particular types of CD-R that are burned in a good quality drive. Until you get to about the 16x to 24x era, it is definitely not a given that it'll be able to read any of them.
CD-RW is a lost cause until you get to drives that were specifically made to read or write them -- and then only if the laser is in good condition. You can pretty much count on it NOT working on anything 8x and earlier. Don't even bother trying. (Well, don't get your hopes up that you can successfully install an OS from an RW disc, anyway. Experimenting just for fun is of course a different matter!)
@@nickwallette6201 yep. thats why I keep some amount of virgin CD-R of good quality
also, I always burn in good drives, at the slowest speed
The Plextor 24/10/40A is the GOAT. I have owned one for 20 years and will never get rid of it. I dont actively use it anymore but burnt a CD using it within the past year and it still works.
I had a HP 7200 internal model before that which was great for making coasters.
literally the best and worst CD writers.
i had them both, too.
I have to thank the TH-cam algo for introducing my to this channel and video. What a great road test of some classic drives!
Thanks for watching! I hope I can save some of those non-working drives!
Watching video later but I still have one rule. Whenever I see Plextor I grab it! Those were truly unbelievable when ripping scratched CD's and still are, if you can find working one and have PC with ATA-connector. Had 2 Plextors between 1998-2006, expensive but absolutely worth the price 😍
I still have my Plextor 12/10/32A around somewhere :) it's a great drive, some drives would introduce errors when reading and writing audio CDs with no pregaps between the tracks, but the Plextor would deal with these flawlessly :)
I have saved a couple of laptop DVD drives from old Lenovo laptops. Using an USB adapter which costs a couple of euros/dollars at Aliexpress, I can connect the drive to any computer, in case I need to read an old CD or DVD. Great for, for example, ripping old CDs to mp3 files. Also, these drives are extremely small, do not require much storage space.
I had one of those Plexwriters too, great drive. Also one of the HP CD Writer Plus drives I think it was my 1st writer cannot recall. Most fond memories of NEC 4X4 IDE Multispin CD-ROM Drive. 4 disc changer in one drive! Only 4X speed but amazing.
Those Plextor drives were lust worthy back in the day. I remember reading Maximum PC back in the day and they always used the top of the line Plextor drive in their annual dream PC build. I would love to see at least the Plextor drives fixed up.
11:14 Some of the Creative branded Matsushita (Panasonic) drives had an interface that LOOKED like IDE but was actually PROPRIETARY to Creative and bundled with some SoundBlaster cards. (I noticed the drive doesn't say IDE or ATAPI but "HOST INTERFACE".)This is before ATAPI was finalised and this /might/ be one of those drives.
Yep, the MKE interface. You can also tell these interfaces because there's no M/S/CS jumper. Just an ID jumper with 4 positions.
You can have a drive configured as "slave" without anything else being "master". It's more like "channel" A and B or something. So you would not need to change configuration of Master/Slave if you don't have anything else on the same IDE cable.
In most cases this works. But some drive/mainboard combos are very picky.
@@stefanmisch5272 never seen any on such combinations. Technically, one is not before the other. The master/slave relationship as if one is over or before the other does not exist. They are just one of the two and the other of the two options.
@@GigAHerZ64 Not exactly true in all cases. If you read the interface spec, there's some coordination between the two during the drive ID phase. I don't remember exactly what it all was, and TBH it's more an issue with early IDE devices and controllers (486 era, e.g.,
I actually remember that CD-Writer Plus from Hewlett-Packard coming with a Dell Dimension 2400 that I had bought for real cheap (~$25) about 10 years ago to retro game on Windows 98SE, it connected directly to the SB Live! soundcard so that audio CDs could be played through the coaxial jack even while powered off. Neat little feature that I appreciated on portable laptops but with a desktop tower you might as well get a boombox
Ooo that LG drive was one I used to have. I was first to have DVD write drive in my area and used to burned stuff for everyone. Even played around with DVD-RAM discs :) . Dont know if its worth keeping, unless you find other DVD-RAM capable ones. AFAIK it also writes + or - discs.
Some creative drives are a bit critical in the IDE controller. I had a dead creative CD drive, so i thought, but connecting it to another motherboard made a difference. I was allready replacing capacitors but none of them showed leakage. Putting everything back and connected it to another PC and it worked.
I repair drives. Recommend keeping all, as they are not difficult to repair, usually. Definitely keep low speed, Creative, or any IDE DVD.
I even know why to save low-speed CD drives. Because they are quiet. Am I right?
At least in windows, you can use utilities to limit the drive speed. For pure DOS, definitely nice to have quiet/slow drives by default.
The 1st HP drives reminds me of a CyberDrive CD ROM I had. It had the same issue but never destroyed a CD.
Both of the Plextor drives and maybe the Toshiba (Samsung branded) one. They were the best in the 90's. We used the SCSI versions mainly for CD mastering back then. We also had a big rack of cheap IDEs (Panasonic,Lg,Sony etc) in the QA Dept. A spindle of manufactured discs would go through for a reality check. We used Doug Carson software for all the mastering and qa at the time.
I don't care how old I get, I will always have an optical drive in my computer. I'm grateful that the Fractal Pop Air exists.
As a technician, I have seen many optical drives issues.
Some drives cannot read writable disks if they are not properly closed or with a compatible filesystem and TOC like Iso 9660 or joliet. Not all drives are compatible with El Torito specifications.
With old DVD or CD media should work.
The issues that you've found with Creative, plextor and HP drives are so common.
Some can be fixed cleaning lenses, putting some lubricant in the metal bar to slide the lens and calibrating the door switch adjusting the gears.
The most problematic could be replacing the rubber band.
If the laser is damaged, then you can't do anything. The drive is dead.
The PlexWriter 24/10/40a is likely the best CD writer ever made, it's also one of the best drives for extracting from audio discs when used with EAC (Exact Audio Copy).
This drive was before Plextor started making (or rebranding) run of the mill drives.
I have almost the same drive models as you, from years of gathering old hardware! I still love using them to install DOS6x/Win3x/9x/Me/NT4/2K/XP from my custom AIO DVD, since many old hardware either doesn't support booting from USB, or has problems/issues that I'm not interested in solving.
I usually clean the laser with isopropyl alcohol, replace the belts when needed, and clean/lubricate the plastic cog wheels. AS a sanity check, I also make an ISO from a CD/DVD to check the final CRC and make sure it's correctly reading the media.
I had that HP Writer plus, and that plextor cdrw. One of those creatives too, in an external bay, connected via i think an external SCSI connector to the sound card. Man, this takes me back..
FYI:
“Reserved” 2-pin connector is almost always SPDIF. 😎👍
Occasionally it's a connection for an eject button to be used with cases that have custom-shaped bays. I've seen this on a relatively modern prebuilt. I don't know why they didn't use a plastic lever to relocate the button like everybody else did.
20:35 missed opportunity to say lights are on but nobody's home
33:53 "Wait, give me another disc right now!"
Before trashing them, remove all the gears inside the drives. Could be useful for other drives.
I have a negative view of floppies. They were slow, loud and unreliable. I had (past tense) a positive view of optical. They were fast, almost quiet, very reliable. But..........these days they are inconvenient. I do admit there was a massive leap forward thanks to them, but you can pretty much find ways around using them these days.
If it's the only device on the IDE channel, it doesn't matter if it's Master or Slave... it only matters if you have more than one device, or have Cable-Select chosen (then the position on the cable decides)
Also check if there is a firmware update available. Remember my first pioneer dvd drive was terrible at first, but excellent after update.
Remember I had all those plextor drives back in the day.
Best cd-rw drives.
The Creative 32X drive was a popular upgrade for the Doctor V64 from Bung Enterprises. That’s because the V64 PSU’s 12 volt rail was weak and Matsushita-made drives did not require a lot of amps to spin up compared to other competing high-speed drives. Everyone knew that Creative CD-ROM drives were Matsushita.
Most V64s shipped with an unbranded 8x Matsushita-made drive but later units shipped with a 24x TEAC slimline laptop drive inside a 5.25” adapter… because of course they had lower power requirements. The V64 is not compatible with many CD-ROMs and I’ve never found a DVD-ROM drive that works.
I’ve also found Apple and IBM-branded Matsushita 8x drives. After hunting for years to restore my V64 units, I recognize them from their bezels alone. ;)
The measure of any optical drive back in the day was its ability to work with tools like ‘Blindwrite’ et al. to copy ‘protected’ media. That was a very active ‘scene’ at the time and well worth exploring. 😉
The Creative Infra is definitely the coolest. I had one, but I forget exactly which model. Even if it doesn't read discs, the ability to control things in Windows with the remote is handy! I even played CDs remotely without using a CD player program. Just make sure the CD audio input (analog) for the sound card is enabled.
Not sure why, but I always find that the later drives 2000+ are the ones that always have stuck trays!
Cool!, make a larger video with full calibrations technics to make them work properly, so we all learn, THX!
Oh, I'm an amateur - I don't know how much you're going to learn. But I'll try!
Any drive with a volume wheel and headphone jack is absolutely worth saving!
I will always have a DVD/CD player in my PC, even 30 years from now
Regarding the LG GSA-4082B , Some older DVD Drives would only recognize certain types of DVD's. I remember back in the day purchasing -R DVD's and plus R DVD's.
Yes, there are a few different types and not every drive can handle every media. I'll try different types for the upcoming videos about those drives.
@@bitsundbolts I actually still have some rare 900mb CD-R's. Yes they did exist. I would purchase them for the purpose of putting movies on a CD-R a long time ago. When I first got the CD-R's they were silver. Now they look gold but it's actually yellowing of the plastic with age.
In my opinion every CD reader below 24x is worth saving, they're becoming rare these days. The slower the better actually, that's less noise and, what's even more important, less vibrations which aren't what old CD media like. Personally I use a quad speed CD-ROM in my main Pentium II retro PC (albeit something between 16x and 24x would be more period correct) and 6x in the other one. Their operation is extremely smooth and quiet.
And before anyone mentions how slow they are... I don't care that installing a two CD game takes 10 minutes, after all I install it only once. Hell, when I find time to have some retro computing fun I'm not in a hurry anyway ;)
the speed doesn't really matter that much when installing yeah, it matters more if you're playing off the cd with seek and such.
we'd use 4x and 8x drives for many years after they were "obsolete" anyway back in the day, worked fine so why spend the upgrade budget on one.
We have CDbeQuiet now.
A lot of noise is just air noise from the gap between the front lid and the front casing. It can be sealed with a thin strip of foam. Some nicer drives from the fast drive era had it from the factory, black foam rubber in a groove. The groove is usually there even if the sealing has been spared.
@@lasskinn474 - my experience is completely the opposite: while installing slightly 'bigger' games such as Blade Runner requires some patience, from that point on it's completely fine, seek and read times are totally acceptable for 1995-2000 games, no stuttering or freezing whatsoever 👍
@@SianaGearz - we do, but a 52x drive in a Pentium 75 setup feels just plain wrong to the period correctness masochist inside me 😉
And also fast drives needs a few sec to spin up and stabilize before responding, causing some (older) games to de-sync cinematics, voiceovers, or maybe loading error(?) in some parts. Slow drives can respond almost instantly.
One of the first things I test with my CD/DVD drives (besides whether they read CDs or not) is to see if their speed can be controlled with Nero DriveSpeed. This can make them so much quieter and usable and still plenty fast.
Most of the drives were UDMA mode 2 (PATA33 for all the kids in here), the first Creative drive was UDMA mode 4 (PATA66). But there also some drives detected as CDROM mode 2, meaning pre-ATA and since they worked with a regular IDE controller they should ATAPI compatible drives. I would look into these, since they are getting more rare.
As I watch this - I’m reminded that there was a lot of variability in what drives would read what media. i.e. cdrom drive might read a CD-R, or CD-RW, or might read one or the other but not both. Same for DVD, but with more possible problems, i.e. DVD drive might read a cdrom fine, and a video dvd fine, but not a data dvd. Or, might do those others, but not read a DVD-RW/RO, or those weird DVD-RW+ discs. My last drives were blu-ray burner slot loaders, and those were pretty awesome to read all other format discs, except for the micro or mini-cd/dvd discs.
finding replacement belts can be a challenge.. looking forward to see if you can fix some of these.. I am a big fan of optical drives.
That creative drive with remote has a special x1 mode that allows you to read the cd in the first pass and on average be faster than x52 speed. A channel called cathode ray dude has a video on it. It is pretty cool.
Plextor drives is something I would keep, but that's mostly for nostalgia
In stuck drives you have to replace tray belt. In automatically closed drives you have to clean open detector (switch inside). When drive doesn't read discs, try to clean the laser by IPA liquid or lubricate laser's head cogwheels or something like that.
Old drives, like pre-1997 ones won’t necessarily read CD-R discs, not to mention RW ones. Also, DVD is 1997 thing if I recall correctly. Very good video, brings up memories and various emotions for an once optical lover like me 😂
I did the same with my drives recently. I have 5 fully functional plextor drives, one of them struggling to open the tray sometimes. Other 2 LG drives, one of them wasn't reading at all and other one just died while I was using it. I think I'll buy a few more IDE drives just in case.
To be fair the first 2 creative drives are just rebranded
only that last one with the mode button and infrared is a real creative drive and this one definetly should be saved just for his unique features
i would try to fix all of those who seems to be made in decent quality
for now IDE drives are still common and easy to find if needed, but who know if that will still be the case in 10 years
That samsung drive at 31:00 is the same drive that I had back around 2006 that exploded a cd by spinning it extremely fast. Mythbusters later busted the myth, but my 2 kids who were mad they couldn't play Incredibles on PC anymore would argue otherwise.
A lot of time ago I had a Plextor SCSI CD 4.5x with the caddy cd tray. It could outperform basically all the 6x drives on the market at that period.
Plextor for the win. In earlier video you had an plextor 716a driver folder in your're desktop. I still have my 716-a sata drive for my small cd/dvd usa of today. 716-a was my best optical drive. There is no working disc that it can not read. it handels difficult over lengt cd's etc with ease and these copy protected discs aswell.
I love optical drives and have quite the collection. All of the Creative drives were made by Matushita and they all open and close fast and hard, even when brand new.
Oh, some tips... When testing cdr/dvdr, you should try to use discs manufactured closer to when the drive was. Plenty of newer disc media use cheaper modern dyes that dont play well with older drives. Or you can track down the good modern optical media like Taiyo Yuden etc. (made in Japan) But can be pretty expensive.
Its rarely a 'works or not' situation, there is almost always a way to bring OD's back to life.
Also, when the drive wont open, press eject and knock on the front top with your knuckles a bit on the harder side and it will pop open. You also dont need to set them to 'master' if youre only using one drive... 'slave' should be fine.
Plextor were my favorites.
I remember buying an HP drive just like that 8200 around 1999 for around $300 usd when I was a broke high school kid and put in my HP tower with a 233mhz cpu and 32mb of ram.
Same I recall paying 450 Canadian for that drive. It was slower but very reliable burns.
I killed the 8x Crative drive by just playing the first two Tomb Raider games. It felt like it was constantly running out of buffer and sounded like a overclocked Dreamcast drive.
Somewhat like if you did use your Dreamcast as a portable cd player while jogging.
My own memories about optical drives never endet. Hopefully I have collected enough drives in the basement, to have enough for the rest of my life ^^
From my collectors POV, the Creative drives are the most important drives. Just from the rareness factor. I personally love the cheap Mitsumi drives from the mid 90s. The double speed up to 8x speeds. The noise of the clunky loading mechanism is 90s feeling pure to me.
I'll try my best to save those Creative drives!
Definitely the Plex drives were always a cut above, they and the TEAC SCSI drives were always great workhorse, burned thousands of discs with these two.
That "Ultima" is an Artec drive, these were Ricoh-based units made in Taiwan and not bad either generally.
This would have been a good application to have some AOL CDs on hand so you could have a mastered CD to test without risking something actually valuable like the Windows 98 disc.
Oh, those CDs were everywhere! I think I might still have some of those.
You should use them for tests...
I still have several optical drives, even a blu ray burner, which i stil use.
From all my retro hardware, optical drives are always the most stubborn to work with!
Back in the day, i bought a brand new similar hp cdrw, 9100, for... reasons. Good old days.
I remember nero burning rom had some testing features.
Oh and i also had that awesome slot-in pioneer. Worked great for years, then, one day, it made a cd or dvd into a million pieces inside it :D
Back in the day there were all kinds of compatibility problems with blank media some brands would work on specific drives and not work on others. The drives that don't read them are not necessarily defective. I would concentrate on using original stamped disks to test the drives.
@40:30 Plextor was known for making drives that were double the budget of others, in part because of being as reliable as a tank, and for being built like a tank. They never opened any quicker than that. Good to know they actually are as reliable as they were proclaimed to be - but I never had the budget to buy one when it was still interesting.
I'd save the Plexwriter, the Creative drives, and all DVD writers among them with a preference to the Lightscribe ones if there are any. The rest were made to a budget and likely to break soon after you fix them.
As someone who used drives such as the ones you used, back when they first appeared, I can say your panic at the HP's noise was unnecessary; some drives simply were that noisy when they spun up to full speed, especially if they were early examples of high speed (32x, 52x). Especially HP which had sponsorship agreements in place, and didn't have to be "good", or have quality of life improvements like quiet operation. If it read the disks, it was good, noise notwithstanding.
I always liked optical media, I know ISO copies exist but being an immutable storage options makes it the boss.
Even if you can't fix some of the drives, you could still try to sell them as a lot for parts. Even just the faceplates are worth keeping for some of them.
It sounds like the HP has lost the plastic holder on the top of the drive. This way the CD is not held and starts wobble in there. But I'm impressed how good it reads the autorun, maybe it is a 3D print job, easy to fix or the part is just misplaced inside?
Plextor 🤓💪 the drive to have "in the old days" 🇩🇰 used with CloneCD and NeroBurner 💪🇩🇰
And ClonyXL/XXL. Those Plexor drives were great at creating backups of 'protected' CDs. I want to cover some of the old copy protections from those days.
👍
add cdr-win and fireburner to the list 🤗
Saved the most interesting one for last. Oh, you sneaky TH-camr, you! 😂
The Creative Infra had two read lasers to get the 60x speed, if I remember correctly. Interesting.
My first CD burner was a retail-packaged HP CD-Writer Plus 8100i (“i” for internal) from 1998 with the same bezel swoosh. I actually still have the packaging and manual. It is a rebadged Sony CRX-100, which I recall because I had to trick it into accepting updated Sony firmware so that I could burn 80 minute CD-R discs. Yes, it’s so old that 700MB wasn’t even the standard yet. I couldn’t even burn Disc-At-Once.
It was one of the earliest consumer CD-RW drives so it could only burn those at 2x (8x read). CD-R wasn’t much better at 4x write speed… and the fastest it could read any disc was 24x in an era when most standard CD-ROM drives were 32x or higher. I suffered with that drive a very long time. :)
This might be sacrilege but there are a number of fun projects that can be made with the rods and motors from desktop CD/DVD drives. If they're not particularly valuable drives for some reason for some esoteric purpose, maybe they could be used for CNC plotters or laser engravers?
TST : TOSHIBA & SAMSUNG
BenQ DW1640 one of the best optical drive for ever
Every drive that can be saved is worth saving, in my opinion. Especially as they are in my experience the most unreliable (relatively) modern PC component behind cheap power supplies, so having a few spare drives is always good.