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I got a few boxes of these CD drives. My question is are they worth anything? Do they have to be taken apart or will you buy them as is? TIA

Boardsort will buy as is for 0.15 per lb. If you brake it apart the board is a CD-ROM board at $4.25 per lb. Part of the casing is aluminum. So it depends if you are In it for the quick nickel or for the slow dime.

If you didn’t start scraping

The 10n can be cross flashed with LGs wn14 firmware. Making a rather low end laptop drive capable of 32-40x dvd read spreads in an external slim caddy.
Depending on the exact revision If you’re willing to pick up a dell SATA or mSATA to usb adaptor you can flash these in about 30 second each and flip them for $10-$25 on ebay or drive swap sites.
Take a look for your model at doom9 before you junk them.

If you have Windows and any cd or dvd disc.
Nero offers a free disc check program
Which works fine on Linux with wine
And on MacOS with PlayOnMac.
Or you can git/make NeroDC on any posix system including windows PowerShell.
Then just pop in a disc and run a 10 second drive test!

This is a cast-off junk drive from MEJ but it’s also extremely popular, along with the 8 and 12 versions, with small film distributors like shriek show, KOTW, etc for use in slim drive towers. There’s no lockout in the base rom so with a firmware patch you can set read speeds to psycho levels.

This was the exact drive I used to make a CD gun for a friend’s post-grad project. Setting the drive to 500x and a guided steal duct to let the discs fly out. :)*

More realistically once patched these can read competently at around 22-26x in a drive tower with a small enough shell and kernel and enough ram. Making them one of the few junk drives to still command above BDRom drive prices.

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