Question: I have saved numerous DVD/CD Rewritable Drives, as well as floppy disk drives from previous computers. I was under the assumption that these drives were practically my hard drives, storing my files and data. Do these CD drives actually store any data? They look oddly similar to actual hard drives.
http://imgur.com/a/cTNkQmQ
Answer:not at all. there is no internal storage on a dvd drive, like a hard drive has.
it is designed to read data from cd/dvd disks and to write to these disks if it can. but the drive itself holds no data at all.
think of a record player. the album has the songs on it and the record player simply reads the info from the album. same with the dvd drive. it is only a reader while the actual information is on the disk you put in it at the time.
no disk in the drive, means no data to be read. you can probably go ahead and donate those old drives to local thrift store as it does not sound like you have a use for them anymore