All that's involved is mounting the drive into a spare 5. 25 inch drive bay in the front of your case, securing it with screws, attaching a SATA data cable to the motherboard, and lastly connecting a SATA power cable to your power supply. See Also: Best Optical Drives for PC. External optical drives are "installed" simply by connecting them to a USB or FireWire port, as appropriate, and connecting power. The following. My motherboard is a MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI. It uses the Realtek® ALC897 Codec. The speakers I'm using are Edifier S2000MKIIIs and the best option for audio on them is optical. As mentioned before, USB-DAC, hdmi to spdif splitter, and a PCI card with SPDIF output, I remember asus having that specific. But if you do have an optical drive to install in your PC, you'll be done in no time as they are one of the easiest, quickest PC components to install. Note: Prior to purchasing an optical drive, it is necessary to make sure that your computer system is capable of meeting the basic requirements, including processor speed, memory capacity and hard. In this TechTip, I'll show you how to install or replace an optical drive. Remove both side panels, since you'll need to access.