I made this monstrosity and it's mostly useless.

I have a few boxes of old optical media that I've been wanting to transfer to my NAS for years. I've dreaded the labor it takes to transfer so many disks so I had an idea to make a big stack of super cheap upcycled CD/DVD/BR drives connected to a 16x powered USB3.0 hub. My naive theory was that parallelizing this task would make it easier.

Boy I was wrong! It turns out that it does not reduce the labor involved, quite the opposite actually. I have no idea which drive is which and disk reading fails frequently due to disk damage. I dunno maybe some drives are busted too. It's pure chaos. Moreover, these drives are pretty fast when the ripping process works I don't have the time to use more 5-6 drives simultaneously. I guess I was expecting it to take much much longer.

So I don't know what to do with this contraption now.

Edit: yes, that is duct tape.