Whenever I would need to access any information out of old media without fear of damaging anything, I'd pop it into The Tower then SSH into it from a rather useless but comfy Macbook 12".
The system has a fanless power supply and GPU making it virtually silent. When it's idle it consumes relatively little power as a server. Admittedly with 2GB of RAM and the latest Gnome/Debian it's beginning to lose it's snappiness as a desktop, but it's still usable. Unfortunately suitable DIMMs aren't easy to find anymore, as a memory upgrade would restore that responsiveness and extend its life by a few more years. Chances are I will have to replace it in the next year or so.
Personally, I can't remember how many old disks and pieces of my computing history that I've thrown out because I can't read them anymore.
I think the idea was to decouple the card that went inside the computer from the physical media. You could use the same card for 10BASE5 or 10BASE2 or even 10BASE-T based on the building wiring.
10base2 had a much more flexible cable, and allowed for T's, so it wasn't too bad to route it right to the computer, and 10baseT was also routed to the computer. So after 10base5 was pretty well dead, budget cards lost the transceiver port, although fiber transceivers were useful in niche cases -- if you needed one, you'd have to more carefully select your ethernet card.
Akai samplers will physically blow an internal fuse if you forget to switch off the zip drive before unplugging it.
That always seemed more impressive to me, and I have expressed it over the years with different types of panels that I've built that carry the look, but not the gravitas, of "serious" control circuitry. I have ressurected some of that when helping a friend design escape room puzzles that are more set piece than functional but it is much more fun to get a clue from something that looks like it could power up a reactor than it is to find it in a coffee can or amongst the graffiti on the wall.
(Apollo machines were early 80s workstations. They ran their own OS, Domain, and had their own two-cable token ring network. Not bad, but too nonstandard.)
By this I am going to assume you mean the cd-rom drive. (And thanks to the 1990s for the computer joke of that decade.)