

Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.
Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.
As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.
If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.
If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.



Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?
From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).