Who takes apart CD-ROM drives for their CPU's?

[CPUShack]

Man in the last few months I've taken apart around 30 of them, all of which have yieled some very neat CPU's.

How bout you?

[hugo929]

I think most of them are MCUs so dont fall into my collection category.

[CPUShack]

[debs3759]

I stripped down a lot of CD-ROM drives and hard drives last year. Lost count early on when I had a room full of PCs in various states of disrepair

Unfortunately, most of the processors that I have identified from them were relatively common (6303, 68HC11, MCS-52, etc, and all common examples). The scrap metal was worth more than the chips I identified (there are more that I will be looking up once I catch up with scanning and a couple of other projects). I'm sure there are some that will be quite interesting when I identify them

I hope to negotiate a deal to fill my car with hard drives, and possibly CD and DVD drives, in a couple of months (at the same time that I hope to empty the scrap processor bins with the contact I made in January). Will have fun testing them, and listing anything that's any good on eBay before stripping the rest down

[CPUShack]

yay for a car full of drives.
I havent found alot of nice CPU's on hard drives, but CD-ROMs have been a gold mine

The most common CPU on them is the Hitachi H8

However I have found ones by:
Motorola
Kawasaki
Samsung
Sony
Panasonic
MediaTek (using a 40MHz 8031 core)

[Blackfury]

hmm i never done that.. i take apart dvd players and some of them have cpu's

[Tech^Cellfish]

Found a Intel 386 on an old (possibly Maxtor) once. Also found an Intel 386 in a Davis projector. I know there are MOS 6502 cpus in Commodore 1541 floppy drives. So peripherals is definitely a source for processors and other chips. Some of the satellite tv decoder units has PowerPC G3 processors in them.

[Marcin]

We can find AMD and intel x186 family MCUs in HDDs, CDROMs.