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Laptop parts reuse: the DVD drive

Unless you get an original idea on how to reuse the CV/DVD drive of a dead laptop (if you do please tell me), the only thing I see is to make the drive an external one, preferably over USB.

Connectors

Once you get the drive out of the laptop, the first thing to look for is the connector and identify it. These are some of the connectors you can usually find:

Slimline SATA: it looks like SATA 22 pins and power pins but the power connector is a lot narrower and only has 6 pins.
SATA 22 pins, aka regular SATA: this is a classical, split connector with 7 pins for data, 15 for power. This connector pair is used a lot in desktop computers, both plugs are flat and have a small 90° dent on one side. I have not found these in laptops yet!
Slim ATAPI: an IDE connector with a rectangle slot and pins laid below it. Sometimes the rectangle slot is shallow, sometimes it's not, I don't really understand this one!

In the SATA family there also is Micro SATA aka uSATA and also Mini SATA aka mSATA but I don't think both are used for laptop CD drives.

In my case I found the following stuff around in the hackerspace:

TEAC DV-28S: Slimline SATA.
TSST (Toshiba/Samsung) TS-L333: Slimline SATA.
Hitachi-LG GCC-4247N: probably Slim ATAPI but the rectangle contains additional pins on the side of a center bar, so the adapters you can find online can't be plugged in, what the hell is this?
Panasonic UJ8E1 (from Asus laptop): Slimline SATA.
Hitachi-LG GS23N (slot-in from Gougou's Macbook): Slimline SATA with a small proprietary adapter that can be removed.

And we still have some drives not pulled out from laptops but this sample will be enough 😄

Adapters

If your drive uses SATA you have a lot of possibilities! First, there are ready-made cases with USB cables in which you can plug the drive and be done with it, costing between €10 and €20 on AliExpress. A cheaper option is to simply buy a SATA to USB converter cable, which is usually less than €10.

Some external case with an USB 3 port for SATA disks

Slimline SATA to USB 3 cable

SATA and power to USB 3 cable

If you are the soldering iron king, you can take apart an old USB cable and resolder its power pins to the drive so you don't have to buy anything.

Video: Frankenstein solution with one USB rewired to power the drive and another USB cable used with a USB/SATA converter for data

If you have a Slim ATAPI connector, there are a bunch of adapters to USB but they seem to be harder to find.

Testing some spare drives

I got some cheap Slimline SATA to USB cables (less than 3€ each). They are plug and play: connect the drive to a computer, it turns on and is ready to read a DVD or CD 🙌

Windows was able to read stuff out of the box. On Debian I had to follow the simple instructions provided by the VideoLAN project to make VLC able to read DVDs:

sudo apt install libdvd-pkg       # this package compiles libdvdcss on its own…
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg  # … if you think about running this command!

Results:

TEAC DV-28S: very noisy; made VLC crash once and then it worked.
TSST TS-L333: makes angry noises but spins up after a while.
Panasonic UJ8E1: works perfectly!
Hitachi-LG GS23N: makes terrifying noises and failed to read both DVDs and CDs.
Hitachi-LG GCC-4247N: could not find an adapter…

Watching Cowboy Bebop on my laptop (184KB)

I also tried to plug the Panasonic on my Raspberry Pi 3B to see if I could watch DVDs from Kodi but it seems to draw a bit too much power (got a few warnings on the command line). I could explore the files on a DVD but not watch its content. I installed the same stuff as on Debian, rebooted and a “Disc” menu appeared on the side bar, with a “Play disc” option! The playback works fine; in the beginning, pressing a remote button or moving the mouse crashed either the playback or Kodi entirely, but it stopped being silly at some point and I could watch EP 2 without issues.

Watching Cowboy Bebop on a Raspberry Pi 3B (170KB)

That's it for today! ♥