I didn’t use to think so – thinking, the CD has to lie flat in the tray. But I’ve seen carts that hold a flat desktop chassis on its side like a tower. Also, both of my desktop machines have little tabs in the CD tray that seem to be there to hold it in place. On one, they can even be flipped back and forth into and out of position, which leads me to believe that this must be an either/or setup.
The tower belongs to a friend of mine, and she has very little room where she intends to put it. Under the desk is not an option – cat hair and little kids, 'nuff said. If we can’t turn it, we’ll just make do with it upright. But I’m wondering if turning it and placing the monitor (14" or 15") on top would be an option, and still let her use the CD drive.
Some locking tabs will not engage simply by letting the drive spin. They need to be slid forward and locked in place and are designed to be locked into place, and stay that way if the CD is operated in a vertical orientation.
You could always prowl around computer stores for a model that either doesn’t have a tray (as was sported on those unsuccessful Mac G4 cubes) or a model that uses a caddy.
Cheaper, though, might be picking up a mini desktop case that is designed to lie flat and transferring all your computer components to it. You’ll need about $50, a small Phillips screwdriver and a few hours. You might even save a few bucks by getting a case without a power supply, simply transferring the tower’s power supply to the new case (be very careful about matching sizes and whatnot).
The biggest problem I can see with trying to use a CD drive sideways is that your disks might slip and get scratched up.
by 1998, hard drives were OK to turn sideways (no, I don’t want to hear about the bleeding-edge technology that would die if looked at sideways - if this were one of those, it would not be around today).
cd were (98% probability) OK.
Turn it off, lay it on its side, power up.
if it doesn’t object, open the tray, insert a i-don’t-care-if-it-dies cd, push button.
A friend of mine recently bought a new DVD player. We were unpacking it at her house and thought “well, wouldn’t this be cool if it would stand on its side?” You know, like a Sony Playstation 2. It had little tabs on the disk tray so we thought we’d give it a shot.
Big mistake.
The disk tray closed sideways alright. When I pressed the “Open” button, it opened normally enough. Sans disk. Yep, the DVD had slipped off the tray into the innards of the player.
With a bit of shaking, we managed to extract said DVD. Surprisingly, despite the shaking, the player works fine now. But yeah, don’t use disks sideways unless you are 100 per cent sure that it will come out.
