Laptop optical drive

[crunchie]

I am looking at a friends Acer Aspire 3680 and the dvd drive does not work. Can I replace it with any optical drive, or must I replace it with one designed for the Acer?

[jmtjet]

Here's one from eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Acer-Aspire-3680...:B:SRCH:US:101

To answer your question. Yes, you'll need to get a compatible drive for that model of laptop.

[puterfixer]

The laptop drive is made of 3 parts:

• the drive itself, with a plastic bezel on front, eject button and usually LED;
• a back plate, proprietary to each laptop manufacturer, connecting the drive's standard connector to the laptop's proprietary connector;
• the caddy or assembly in which the drive is mounted for easy removal from the laptop.

Now, usually any optical drive will do, except for the situation when the drive caddy has some sort of lever or button for pulling out the drive from the laptop. This requires a drive with a custom faceplate, leaving room for that lever. Some of Dell's drives are like that, for example this is the drive and this is the caddy with the recessing lever.

Other than that, you can get any kind of optical drive you fancy, then replace the old one and reuse the backplate with the custom connector and the caddy. I did that for an old Dell Latitude with the difference that the old style caddy needed a bit of filing to make room for modern drives. Nowadays, the space in the laptop is a snug fit for the drive itself, and the opening is fully covered by the drive's faceplate.