Blogs Is it time to bin your optical drive?

The only time I've had to use an optical drive recently was a couple of months back when a friend needed to install windows onto a machine that didn't support booting from USB devices (it was ancient). Before that the drive had been sitting in a box for what must've been 2-3 years, unused, unloved. Long live Steam and such.

 

Meh the drives DO randomly ramp up every now and then, which also used to make the entire "my computer" freeze for a while.

That sucked.

 

Great for you!!! Too bad many of us don't have that kind of bandwidth or lack of throttling. If I had that sort of throughput, I would still have a Blu-Ray/DVD burner drive to burn discs for my unfortunate friends that didn't have the ability to do huge downloads without hitting a monthly cap before being throttled to turtle speed. After downloading 15 GB or so of games on Steam during Christmas, I hit the throttle cap. It took about 2 and half days to download another 8 GB game. More or less, I paused it when I wanted to do web browsing, albeit at a much lower speed than normal. The US is far behind when it comes to providing realistic bandwidth. Most wireless providers claim to have an "Unlimited" plan, but only a small handfull don't have the monthly caps that cripple the connection speed.

 

The Optical drive in my PC is going nowhere, I primarily use it for ripping CD's or playing Films (some of Netflix's HD content is awful - not even DVD quality).

I also use it for creating CD's for the car as that is only a single slot system with no line out (not changing it for one of those horrible blinged up POS that you see in the likes of Halfords).

The Optical drive stays along with the floppy drive in my system

 

I still use mine about once per year. Last year I used it twice, once to install Arma2/Operation Arrowhead which I bought a few years ago on disks because I heard that the steam version made modding tricky. And I also used the Windows 7 repair disk I think as well.

But I also have some films on DVD too so I wont be ditching it any time soon. And if it was to die, I would probably get another one which does bluray/hd-dvd like the one in my htpc. I rather have it and rarely need it, than need it and not have one. But 99% of the time I copy stuff back and forth using USB pens or my external hard disk in a caddy (its in a nice USB 3 caddy so its really fast).

 

No optical drive for me in my next build. I agree with everything said in the article. It's another $17 I could put somewhere else tbh. I have my laptop if I need an optical drive.

 

warning: rant

I'm currently living (going for about a month now) on the sad face end of the no physical media spectrum therefore 'no optical disk'. There's a pitfall and it's particularly nasty. To live without physical media requires that you have a constant internet connection, unfortunately my CC renewed renewed recently causing some of my automatic bill payments to disrupted rather than giving my a courtesy call informing me that my CC info is out-of-date Company A (Comcast) just waited until the account was deliquent and the abruptly DC'd service, this caught me off-guard because I subscribed to their paperless service yet they don't even email the monthly statements, while Company B thru N called me for the updated info and Company O thru Z automatically switched over. This pissed me off to no end which is a whole other story and decided to go with the next provider (AT&T, bad idea btw). While AT&T is taking their sweet, sweet time I'm sitting here without internet. It was fine and dandy for th first week or so THEN the stored credentials started expiring first to expire was Origin,then Steam, then my music and video, the stuff that I didn't use on a regular basis I was locked out from the get go.

If I had the physical media this situation would be so aggravating I'd simply pop in a disc and do whatever I want from that point onwards. Because of this I won't be ditching physical media anytime soon.

 

I think people might be missing a point here whilst I realise that living without an optical drive would not necessarily bring me to point of utopia. I believe it would be easier than most people think and give my htpc come gaming rig a less cluttered look and wouldn't have to be so bulky, but, and this is an enormous but, I think it would be dangerous to have everyone convert to this. Imagine if you will HMV a regular sight on a busy high street would eventually go bust if more and more people went digital imagine that, a national giant going bankrupt, wait hang on a second, get the drift. Very dangerous thing has anyone even been down their local high street lately, scarey. I understand people's point of view but spare a thought for the little people behind the till. Oh and the techs, the people developing software etc etc the list goes on.

 

I still have plenty of reasons to have an optical drive. I till play plenty of games that need installing via disc - not everything is cheaper via Steam. I never use the original disc for a car CD player either, as I keep discs in the car, so it's handy for copying them. I also have made backups of home videos for friends, which again requires recoding onto discs for playing in DVD players. Dics are handy cheap ways of backing up photos too, portable storage isn't as cheap as a pack of discs and is certainly no safer either. Alot of software you get still comes via optical format too, especially so concerning driver discs and software packages included in things like printers and cameras. I shouldn't be forced to download things like that, I expect it to be there in the box. I would find it impossible to live without an optical drive basically and can't see a day when it wouldn't be useful for something.

 

Im keeping my optical drive I hate video or audio thats been commpressed far to much as in streaming video and audio physical media is much better

 

On similar nota, I discovered the "Stealthed Tray" of my computer I had completely forgotten about for the last five years.
It houses a Floppy drive

That's why I generally buy a T-Shirt at concerts

Very common here in Germany too.

 

Why even bother with 3rd party software for converting your windows disc / iso to USB... Microsoft offers their own tool to do it all in a handful of quick clicks.
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

just sayin'

 

@MadBandit

The windows utility cannot read from a windows disk. The other one can. No iso required

just sayin'