If your laptop shopping list includes a touch screen, SSD storage, or even NFC, finding a new system shouldn't be hard. But if you're still tied to your optical discs and need a DVD or Blu-ray ...

Most optical discs are a standard 12cm in diameter ... the odd shapes will get them stuck in many slot-loading drives seen in MacBooks, MacBook Pros, Mac Minis, and iMac systems.

Your contacts might never forget the headache of having the disc jam inside a slot-loading optical drive. If such a jam happens to you, follow these steps to release the disc. With the slot ...

then place the enclosure into the MacBook Pro’s optical drive slot and replace the optical drive’s three screws. Photo: Chris Barylick Once the enclosure is in place, swap the hard drive ...

Like all Apple’s optical drives since the 1990s iMac, it a slot-loading design, which means there’s no fiddly tray to attach the disc to before sliding a wobbly mechanism closed. Inserting a ...

These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console ... Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drives hit the market that required ...

5. Inserting a thin piece of cardboard into the optical slot as the disc is spinning can force it to stop and may then trigger the drive to eject the disc. 6. The "try anything" school of thought ...

But they've also meant that people who still needed those technologies also needed to deal with dongles, adapters, or clunky external accessories ... a metal, slot-loading optical drive from ...

Some optical drives dispense with the tray entirely; you simply feed the disc into a narrow slot, like in a car's CD player. Types of optical media in use today The optical drive exists to ...

Basically, this allows you to have an SSD without taking up the single 2.5" storage slot within your laptop, so you could then have an optical drive, an SSD as well as the standard hard drive.