Blogs Is it time to bin your optical drive?

As for ripping CDs... FLAC forever! mp3 is dead since 2000's to me.

 

CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs can store quite a lot of Data and still cost the cheapest per GB generally, especially DVD's. Hence why most games still sell in the shop. However USB sticks once having the cheaper per GB may well take their place. Unless we all get 100mb lines in our houses and the standardised infanstructure in all our economies then the optical media will still have some use for now.

 

Next you'll be telling me to get rid of my floppies!

 

i still need my dvd drive
sometimes i burn movies on dvds for my friends
or burn a windows 7 on a dvd
and sometimes ubuntu on a cd

 

FLAC FOR EVER !!!!
im getting lossless audio from my vinyls , you ?

 

ur wrong on this one
the ps3 never upscales it plays games either on 720p or lower
only the xbox360 upscales since it uses coaxial

 

Haven't had an optical drive on my main computer for five(?) years. I just HATE the noise those things make.

 

OK, so its improving, but there are still a HUGE number of car stereo's and home stereos that don't have USB or streaming capabilities.
I have a CD writer so that I can make CD's of the music I've bought.

And how did you make your bootable USB from your windows DVD? Did you just wave the DVD near the USB stick and it copied across? Or did you use the loathsome optical drive to copy the files?

I can see external; hide it in a drawer until its needed; opticals being useful, but getting rid of them entirely? For the sake of £12? Thats just crazy talk.

 

got a bur ray / burner combo drive - i watch blu ray on my pc

 

I have managed without a optical drive since I built my computer back in July last year, but I must admit that the above point rang true! I had to use my laptop with a optical drive to create the bootable CD. I did worry that I would hit some issues with installing hardware that required setup CDs for drivers but these days the drivers are out of date before you know it and manufacturers have the latest drivers available on their website.

 

This opinion piece is pure bobbins. As with any hardware, optical drives are only flaky if you buy a crap one, they still have a purpose for many people, they provide flexibility for those of us who spend a good proportion of our time fixing other people's off-the-shelf PCs and even decent optical drives are cheap as chips. I rest my case.

Also Silver51's comment x 9000.

 

I get around this problem by not using mine 99.9% of the time.

 

A few people have mentioned externals, and this is probably the way to go. I made an external out of my laptop dvd drive. With a 5 or 6 euro kit from ebay, it works fine. You could probably do something similar with a 5.25 inch drive and keep it some where until you need. I'm almost certain that opticals will eventually disappear but not quite yet.

 

With FTTC at 80/20. I have no reason for an optical drive anymore.

I can download at 9.2MB/sec and upload at 2.5MB/sec all day long.

A 10GB game takes around 12 minutes.

BT have scrapped all traffic management, limits and shaping.

Sky don't do it either.

 

Floppies? Omg, I'm gonna have to upgrade

 

Tell me about it! I'm not going to make that mistake again in a hurry.

 

You should! They are the future of electrical computation machines everywhere.

 

You're welcome. With any luck, the efforts Apple makes will mean better masters all around...

Playing 4K is easy, rendering high-quality 3D at 4K is the hard bit, but doable on a modern triple-quad-SLI/Crossfire setup.

The PS3 and XBox360 render at lower resolutions (480p/SD, 720p) then upscale to a 1080p signal that gets sent to your TV via HDMI. You should read up on the definition of upscaling. And the XBox360 has never used coaxial. Composite, component and HDMI only.

I will concede that: optical media is cheap to mass produce compared to flashing thousands of flash modules.

All of which is easily doable using a USB drive and/or external harddrive and/or a LAN.

If you use the WAIK (Windows Automated Install kit) and some PXE magic, you can even install windows over a LAN from a remote machine. It's how large enterprises do it. The same can be done for Linux.

When I get a car, I'll be replacing the standard head-unit with a touchscreen connected to an HTPC mounted somewhere in the trunk. Will probably run android or something similar. From there audio goes into an amp etc. This is of course more involved than most people care to do, but more and more cars come with a 3.5mm aux input, which means its getting easier and easier to just drop in your phone.

All Microsoft ISOs are available legally via the MS online store and MSDN. And then there's torrents with the updates slipstreamed in and whatnot. Fact is, MS has to provide the ISOs in order for people to be able to use the WAIK.

I personally haven't used an optical drive since I copies over my last few CDs...

The drives themselves are fine. The discs on the other hand....

 

Shame there are still a load of games out there that check for a physical disc then really.
Also, how else am I going to get my christmas present CD's onto my machine?
-J

 

I still backup important files, programs etc on DVD's and put away in storage
But I don't use drives that much, mostly for OS install on older machines (no usb boot) or if using XP install etc

I use IDE still as that port is becoming redundant when I use all SATA for HDD's