A few years ago (before the days of my home LAN) I was looking for a way to transfer large files between my laptop and my desktop.  While wondering round the high street, I spotted a rather dishevelled looking box for a Sony CRX-100-EX Spressa USB CD-RW in a shop window.  Perfect!  After some haggling, I managed to get the storekeeper down to £50 for the unit.  Even better...
Then I set up an network.  All of a sudden I didn't need the CD-RW any more, and it was too old to be worth selling.  It sat disused next to my laptop for a long time.  One thing I *did* want for my laptop was a way to play DVDs away from the network.  Alas, the £300 external DVD drives were a trifle out of my reach...
Or were they?  On a suggestion from Lucifer, I set about dismantling the USB CD-RW...

As you can see, the unit is a large caddy that powers the drive (a standard internal model) and provides the connectors to the host PC (USB and stereo RCA for CD-Audio).  In case you're wondering why this picture is of a DVD drive, that's because I forgot to take a picture of the unmodified unit - d'oh!

So, let's take the lid off...  You can see in the image below the power unit (to the bottom of the picture), the drive itself, and some circuitry at the back (a better picture of that in a minute.  Upon inspection, I noticed that the drive *was* a perfectly standard EIDE drive using a 40-pin connector.  So, out with the 4x4x6 CD-RW drive and in with a 4x4x32x8x DVD/CD-RW drive I happened to have lying around...
 

Did it work?  Of course it did!  DVD video on my laptop.... Mmmmmmm, nice....
 

So, the next time you have some old hardware lying around, think about modding it - you never know what might work!

-Blacklaw
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