> There is a pin 34 “Disk Change” that is supposed to give this information, but this is basically a lie. None of the drives in my possession had that pin connected to anything, and the internet mostly concurs. In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch, that would engage when a disk was inserted.

I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?

Reading the drive is a mechanical process so it would be constantly making noise and wear out components