It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

[Kyle] wanted to try something new. A Persistence of Vision Clock using a CD-ROM drive. We have covered lots of POV Clocks that make use of hard drives, but we think this is the first time we have … ...

Still, the CD-ROM drive itself wouldn't spin up, and a system check mode failed on the "CD I/F" test. The system was sending commands to the CD drive but not receiving any responses back.