Optical drive survey

[Dominik W]

Just now, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

Who's here from WAN show?

me!

[Apocalypsse]

If my case had a slot for it, I'd still be using my internal BD drive, but I had to buy an external. Still need the drive for older games and software.

[thedangerine]

On ‎12‎/‎9‎/‎2018 at 6:37 PM, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

Ok question 2 was supposed to have an option that said, "Like Linus in season 5 of scrapyard wars I will fight to keep it in my computer." not sure what happened to it so I guess like this reply or hit agree if you feel that way about it (I certainly do)

Friendly reminder that this was supposed to be in question 2

[DanMottram]

Just now, Dominik W. said:

me!

yeah me

[EvilKitty]

1 minute ago, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

Who's here from WAN show?

me

My external optical drive is the one i pulled form my laptop where i replaced it with a ssd

[DanMottram]

2 minutes ago, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

Who's here from WAN show?

Yeah me 

i have the optical drive from my old pc but im not going to install it until i need it 

 

[TheGeek2448]

2 minutes ago, Apocalypsse said:

If my case had a slot for it, I'd still be using my internal BD drive, but I had to buy an external. Still need the drive for older games and software.

There still are SOME cases that have 5.25" bays. That's one of the reasons I got my Corsair Carbide Air 540

[ReSummit]

Lol, just came here from the WAN show (but thanks Linus and Luke for making this topic more noticeable).

 

I have some of my childhood movies and media that I use, but I have been looking into copying the media so I can have easier access (and seriously, I would like to watch my old Mr. Bean movies with my CD). Though, I tried to put media on a CD, but I couldn't because I was using something like 4 to 5 gigabytes of CD storage. Still, I would like to at least have an optical drive around just in case.

Edited January 5, 2019 by ReSummit
Grammatical edits.

[Velcade]

My old DVD player had lightscribe.  It's not something I have thought about in a long while.  Still have some LS DVDs lying around the office.

[Mc0023]

I tried Lightscribe back in 2008ish and it worked about as well as I thought it would but never really had a use for it. I haven't owned a burner that supported it since then but I wouldn't necessarily say it sucks.

[PlayStation 2]

I have CDs. I have quite a number of CDs.

I also have DVDs. I have quite a number of DVDs I rip content from.

[EvilKitty]

20 minutes ago, TheGeek2448 said:

There still are SOME cases that have 5.25" bays. That's one of the reasons I got my Corsair Carbide Air 540

I use my 5.25" bays for hot swap HDD bays, i have a Define R4

[Lady Fitzgerald]

57 minutes ago, TheGeek2448 said:

There still are SOME cases that have 5.25" bays. That's one of the reasons I got my Corsair Carbide Air 540

The paucity of 5.25" bays in cases is one reason I built my own case.

 

36 minutes ago, EvilKitty said:

I use my 5.25" bays for hot swap HDD bays, i have a Define R4

I've done the same thing. The hot swap bays are handy for bare backup drives. I have four trayless hotswap bays in the computer I'm building plus a USM hot swap bay for backing up my notebook backup drives.

 

44 minutes ago, handymanshandle said:

I have CDs. I have quite a number of CDs.

I also have DVDs. I have quite a number of DVDs I rip content from.

I just ripped eight CDs I recently bought. I rip my CDs to 320kbps mp3 files and to .wav files. I also rip my DVDs and BDs. The rips are for my use only and I still haave the original discs (although I will eventually destroy them).

[IMI4tth3w]

My server PC has 4 internal CD/DVD drives, 1 external CD/DVD drive, and 1 interal used externally with sata to usb adapter Blu Ray/DVD/CD drive. I use these for ripping CDs and DVD/Blu Rays pretty frequently. Looking at getting a UHD compatible Blu Ray drive that hasn't been firmware locked so i can do UHD Blu Rays soon as well. Same PC has a ton of HDDs too lol. Every sata port is populated and just got an 8 port USB 3.0 hub for more external expansion lol. Oh and it even has a pcie 4 port sata card.

ANyways... i'm just not a fan of the compressed video streams when i have an option to rip my content losslessly from physical media, then stream it from my server anytime anywhere. But if you're not a huge stickler for these things (which most reasonable people would be), compressed video streams are just fine

[zaisaroni]

I bought my Define R6 because it checked the optical drive box, and still gave me options for actually having real hard drives and flexible radiator and fan options.

I have two lightscribe drives that used to be in one PC, and one is on a shelf, and the other is in a garage computer.... Never used LS in 15 years. I keep the BD burner in my desktop for edited videos, and i'll start doing backups on BDs for offisite as an alternative to HDD backups i'll have.

[Dabombinable]

Both internal, 8x Bluray burner primary, 22x DVD+M-Disc burner secondary. I have also used Lightscribe exactly once, as the external 8x DVD bunrer/RAM drive that I bought supported it and came with a Lightscribe DVD. It worked well....but its limitations meant that discs which could be printed on (my "guzzle all the ink" printer works with them somehow) were still the best.

Also, disc drives in general are perfect if your internet is limited and you have terrible internet speeds. Speeds that are put to shame by CD-ROM drives from the mid 90's.Most of my programs install completely from disc, and my BR drive only works at its proper speed....within Linux or over the network on another computer (Windows, Android and iOS as a shared networked drive)

[captain_aggravated]

WAN show sent me here.  Ah, optical drives.  A lot of my all time favorite games came on CD.  Nowadays, since laptops just straight-up don't come with optical drives, I have an external CD/DVD burner.  I use it for many tasks:

1. Watching DVD movies/shows on my computer.  I own no television, so this is the only way for me to enjoy these things.
2. Burning red book audio CDs.  I have a CD player in my 16 year old vehicle, so I still burn the occasional audio disc.
3. Playing some of my aforementioned favorite games of all time.  Wine FTW.
4. My laptop came with a Windows install DVD.  This has been used.
5. I've burned several Linux Live Discs, though for distro hopping I tend to use USB drives. But for certain things like Clonezilla or Puppy Linux, I have CDs or DVDs.
6. Very, very occasionally, the terms of a non-disclosure agreement forbid transmitting customer documents across the internet, so I've had to burn a CD to hand deliver or mail.
7. I may soon use DVD-Rs as archival media.  I have a lot of old work files and some personal files dating all the way back to my teens that I just don't look at anymore but can't bear to delete, so these are soon to be offloaded onto DVD.
8. I have an old Windows 98 PC that I occasionally use for old school shenanigans, and the only common format I have between my modern computers and that thing is CD. Most recently, a bunch of PalmOS software was transferred that way. 

I guess most of this is due to living in the past, with the possible exceptions of 1 and 7.  On the subject of #1, I've often thought that--if I had an audience--I would encourage a "stick it to the man" initiative about depopulating the internet.  Stop watching Netflix and listening to Spotify and instead go watch/listen to your old VHS/DVDs/CDs/cassettes/actually go outside.  One of the things I'm aggravated about is how much control the content providers have these days.

 

Also, on the subject of #1, I'm in the long and arduous process of renovating my bachelor pad, and in searching for inspiration I stumbled upon a listicle site that advised bachelors "Get rid of that tacky DVD collection, what is this, the 90's?" and "Can never have enough books!"  Hilariously, the accompanying photo of books showed a bookshelf that was sorted by spine color.

 

This is the very first time I've heard of LightScribe.

[Lynxman]

Blu-Ray Writer in my workstation. No optical drives in my gaming PCs. Used to have a HD DVD and Blu-Ray drive in my HTPC but have removed it and am using the drive as an external drive when I need it now.

[airman85UK]

I have a CD/DVD reader/burner because I still buy CDs and DVDs on sale and I just copy them to my plex server... other than that it's about it!

[AdKeyz]

I held onto my old PC case for so long because I didn't want to give up on my 5.25" bay for a DVD-RW drive as I burn discs quite often.

 

I recently had to change my case for thermal reasons (upgraded to a Vega 64 and needed room for more fans/radiator) and bought an external DVD-RW drive so I could keep burning discs.

 

I am a retro video game collector and all of the CD based consoles I have either have some kind of mod to run games from CD/DVD-Rs or just never had any copy protection to start with.

 

Some of these games are super rare or expensive or both and I prefer to run the game from a burnt disc backup copy and keep the real one on a shelf, in it's box so it's not going to get damaged or lost.

 

It's also handy if I want to buy a new game and if I have never played it before I can try it out first, like making my own demo discs in a way, then either buy a real copy or destroy the disc I made.

 

On top of that, I also have a lot of old PC games that you either can't get a digital copy of on Steam or GOG or whatever so still need a drive for an old school install.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

43 minutes ago, AdKeyz said:

Some of these games are super rare or expensive or both and I prefer to run the game from a burnt disc backup copy and keep the real one on a shelf, in it's box so it's not going to get damaged or lost.

I would make an ISO of the disk and run it, using a virtual ODD (Optical Disc Drive) such as Virtual Clone Drive, instead of bothering with a burned disc (actually, that is exactly what I do with all my CDs, DVDs, and BDs). I would also make backups in case the ISO goes bad or gets accidentally deleted (actually, I do do that). Burned discs won't last forever unless burned on archival discs, which are expensive. I've even had a few stamped CDs and DVDs go bad on me after I had them for a while.

[TechyBen]

External blue ray exists. I had a customer (I was a cleaner, not IT lol, but we built a PC! XD ). He had an external bluray writer, as of cause, when in the store, that's the easiest thing to pickup and plug in. His new build had no optical drive, as it can use the external one (and annoyingly, I'd forgotten DEL and similar use to use custom shaped drive covers, so you could not migrate old DVD drives to a new case, as the DVD drive faceplate had a strange shape).

 

This build has a slim line, and I'm planning on possibly a blu ray slimline or an external one anyhow (got an external DVD usb one for now).

[tikker]

I love the result that the majority does not have an optical drive in their PC, voted "almost never" for when they need it, yet still deems it useful to have one.

[Egg-Roll]

I'm more shocked at how many don't know what lightscribe is than anything else.

 

Also question #3 sounds generic, so much so imo people prob should include dvd/blu-ray players/gaming systems hooked up to a TV, I know it's about computer drives, but is it really when its left so generic? If you where to include those I wonder of the 130+ who voted Literally never would have to change their vote.

 

15 hours ago, TheGeek2448 said:

There still are SOME cases that have 5.25" bays. That's one of the reasons I got my Corsair Carbide Air 540

Some? A lot actually have slots, it's just the ones everyone including LMG are pushing don't. Also imo tempered glass is currently a trend which will die off soon (5 or so years), I don't think 5.25 drives are dead esp where bandwidth doesn't permit 4k or 1080 60fps streaming and even then I can see having a hard copy vs always streaming or relying on drives (requiring you to hold GB's of data for replay ability). I just think the 5.25 drives are dead for gamers only since most games have moved to digital distribution, but for music and movies it's still a nice asset to have. (yes I know you can buy a sync from online store like iTunes but ewww I rather a hard copy I can make a copy for my self w/o dealing with DRM)

 

Not to mention a PC is possibly the least buggiest Blu-Ray player going  Well maybe next to a PlayStation.

2 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I would make an ISO of the disk and run it, using a virtual ODD (Optical Disc Drive) such as Virtual Clone Drive, instead of bothering with a burned disc (actually, that is exactly what I do with all my CDs, DVDs, and BDs). I would also make backups in case the ISO goes bad or gets accidentally deleted (actually, I do do that). Burned discs won't last forever unless burned on archival discs, which are expensive. I've even had a few stamped CDs and DVDs go bad on me after I had them for a while.

Not to mention ISOs run faster due to read and spin up times, tho I do miss the grinding of the drive in the good old days but the loading times where sometimes horrid.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

Not to mention ISOs run faster due to read and spin up times, tho I do miss the grinding of the drive in the good old days but the loading times where sometimes horrid.

I miss the noise and the loading times about the same as I miss a throbbing toothache.