I'm no prude when it comes to taking computers apart (I was even Apple Certified back in the day), but pulling out, or replacing the optical drive in an iMac is a pain in the butt and something I'd rather avoid. I was preparing to pass it on to the kids, but wanted to resolve the disc issue first, because I know they'd keep clicking on it and I was afraid we'd hit a state where it simply wouldn't spin down. In this case, the DVD was stuck in a 24-inch iMac that I used on a daily basis and the icon on the desktop, along with the occasional spin/eject cycles was bugging me.

If you leave it, the drive will sometimes be quiet for days, but you know it's there and one false move - accidentally clicking on that icon - starts the maddening revving cycle. If you use the usual methods to try to eject it (such as choosing 'Eject' from the Finder, or dragging it to the Trash), you can be rewarded by an endlessly revving optical drive, as the disc is constantly spun up, remounted and clicks as it fails to eject. It will spin the drive up, trying to read the disc, sometimes repeatedly. If a disc becomes stuck in the drive for some reason, it can quickly become a cause of irritation and frustration. In the old days, Apple provided a manual eject button you pushed in with a paperclip however, Macs released in the past few years have been lacking this handy feature. What has been driving me crazy is what happens when someone inserts a DVD into a broken drive which then refuses to eject it.

Whatever the reason, I currently have four Macs with shot optical drives. It may well be a side-effect of kids - one of which was the subject of one of my first GeekDad posts, way back in May 2007 (in that case, it was paper shoved in an iMac's DVD slot). That may have something to do with the amount of pet fur flying around here or the frequent renovations that have been known to kick up dust.

In my experience, the optical drive is often the first thing to fail on Macs, at least around my house. With the latest round of super thin iMacs it introduced last year, Apple did away with optical drives in its all-in-one desktop PCs.

Mac dvd drive replacement