Background
I want to put together a little home media box on the cheap with a Raspberry Pi and some used parts I had. I have an original MacBook that bit the dust and but had a working optical drive. Laptop was disassembled and drive extracted. I thought it was going to be SATA but it turned out to be slim ATAPI (JAE 50 pin connector). Google brought me here: http://www.amazon.com/USB-50-Pin-Slim-CD-Slim-Adapter/dp/B0058V4TH6/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1362024018&sr=1-2&keywords=jae+50+pin+to+usb
Current situation
So the adapter came today and I plugged it in and the drive made its classic grindy load noise (hadn't heard that in awhile)! Windows recognized the hardware as: "MATSHITA CD-RW CW-8221 USB Device". When I put a CD in it spun up and didn't seem to like it. The drive was clearly spinning the disc up, pausing, spinning, pausing, ...etc etc. Windows 7 did a nice little IO hang on the Explorer window attempting to eject the disk. I finally got the disk to eject by squishing the drive in different places (I couldn't find any other eject mechanism). On the MacBook itself there is an eject button on the keyboard that must send a direct signal to the hardware...
Question
Do I have a chance of this thing working? With the adapter the device got power and Windows recognized it, but would the hardware be fine tuned for an Apple controller? I remember hearing from someone about all the hardware optimizations Apple made on their laptops so they could go to sleep/wake up faster. I didn't see anyone else talking about trying to do this on the net. Its a nice slot loading drive that I had handy so I am hoping to figure something out.