Optical drives are disappearing slowly from the computers as everything is possible with USB drives and software, whether it is operating systems or computer games, is now downloaded mainly from the internet as opposed to buying them on DVD drives. But they are still available for the backward compatibility or for accessing your older backups. If you have a new laptop, then the optical drive eject button is not as big as it used to be in the older desktop computers.
If you want to conveniently and safely operate your optical drives, then you can make use of a free software called OpenCloseDriveEject. The name of the software says it all. It can open, close and eject an optical drive. Actually it can work with all types of drives. When you launch it, it will show you all the detected drives on your system. For each drive, it displays information such as volume, path, status, media type, serial number, capacity, physical path and the available operations for that drive.
You can right-click on any of these drives and access the available actions for it. Basically you get the options to eject the drive, explore the drive or close the tray (if it is optical drive and the tray is open). If you try to eject a hard drive or portable USB drive, it will be removed from system so you can remove the USB cable safely. However, depending on the drives Windows may or may not allow you to remove them.
OpenCloseDriveEject displays a list of all the available drives in your PC and helps you to remove them safely. For the optical drives, you get the options to open, close or eject them. And for the removable USB drives, you can remove them safely so that no loss of data takes place.
You can download OpenCloseDriveEject from https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/OpenCloseDriveEject.