His use of a 3-phase motor from a CD-ROM drive as the generator isn’t particularly unexpected, these motors are ubiquitous and readily generate power when spun up. A simple 3-phase rectifier and ...

The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates. The original CD-ROM drive (1x) transferred data at 150KB per second. By doubling the spindle RPMs, the data transfer rate ...

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.

When USB drives first arrived, vendors used CD-ROM ratings whereby each "x" equaled 150KB per second. For example, a 90x drive meant 13.5MB/sec (90 x 150KB). See CD-ROM drives and solid state.