I recently bought this drive off eBay for about $45, and it arrived today. It was extremely well packaged and protected, but when I connected it to my IDE to USB adapter, it showed little to no signs of life. The tray simply jerks back and forth a few millimeters when you press the eject button.
It's so frustrating because you can tell this drive is close to being functional, but there's something holding it back. These tray-loading DVD-RAM drives are getting harder and harder to come by these days and I'd like to get this example working if I can, so I appeal to tech nerds here and elsewhere to posit solutions to try, especially if you've had experience with this before.... I'm first going to try connecting this to an actual PC with IDE and Molex connections, since it's entirely possible it's the Chinese adapter I'm using that's causing the issue. Will update accordingly.