Place internal 5,25 drive vertically

[atp-flo]

Hey guys, I was just wondering if it is possible to mount an internal 5,25" optical disc drive vertically. There are external enclosures for those drives and it would be nice if you could mount them to the wall. But many or most internal drives do not have these disc clamps but you just lay the disc inside.

My question is 1) is it possible to put the disc inside when it is at a 90° angle or will the disc fall out?
2) What if you mount it like 89°-85° to the wall so the disc stays more or less in place? Would it work then?

Thanks!

[Billycar11]

it should work you just might sometimes have a disc fall on the floor when you eject it or its going in because of the try slop the amount it can jiggle when its moving in and out the pioneer s13's have less of that than the lg/asus and pioneer 212 so that probably the preferable drive for that use case

[dmdmmatt4]

Having done this on occasions it's only really practical if the drive tray is suitable, such that the disk doesn't simply fall off the spindle. Some drive trays have little hooks, some don't.

[Toscaclarinet]

There used to be a whole load of PC cases that had vertical 5.25" optical drive bays, we had an HP one in our HTPC and dell was quite fond of them as well. So most 5.25" drives used to be manufactured with the expectation they could be mounted vertically. All the drives I have owned have had a couple of prongs around the diameter that the disc sits it when vertical. Whether that is still the case I don't know, but should be obvious if you open the drive. I have never seen a disc go flying out when the tray is ejected, and we used to used our HTPC to watch discs basically every evening.