Why did people stop liking optical drives in their desktops?

[Popo576]

Like I get laptops to like be thinner and lighter but why desktops? I use my optical fairly regularly for things like movies and music

[Sarra]

I haven't used an optical drive more than twice in the last 6 years or so. Everything I have is on a SSD, or thumb drive. I mean, I have thumb drives that can hold my entire CD music collection, and I very rarely watch anything other than YouTube. The last time I used an optical drive, it was to install Windows 10, and... I bought a cheap USB BR player for it.

 

I don't want to switch back to optical, either. They were a nightmare to use, and I'm glad I'm done with them. @__@;

[andrewmp6]

7 minutes ago, Popo576 said:

Like I get laptops to like be thinner and lighter but why desktops? I use my optical fairly regularly for things like movies and music

Most people don't use them anymore.I haven't bought a game with a disc since bf3 and use streaming apps for movies.Some people use a usb drive for their media use.

[NF-A12x25]

nobody uses them

[RONOTHAN##]

7 minutes ago, Popo576 said:

I use my optical fairly regularly for things like movies and music

You are also probably one of the only people left doing that. It takes up space in the front of the case that could be used for more fans and it's added cost for a feature that realistically 98% of people would never want. Movies and music have largely been moved to streaming with services like Netflix and Spotify, and general data transfer has been taken over by the prevalence of cheap USB drives. There are still people who have a use case for it, but it's just no where close to as common a use case as it was 5+ years ago. 

[andrewmp6]

1 minute ago, Sarra said:

I haven't used an optical drive more than twice in the last 6 years or so. Everything I have is on a SSD, or thumb drive. I mean, I have thumb drives that can hold my entire CD music collection, and I very rarely watch anything other than YouTube. The last time I used an optical drive, it was to install Windows 10, and... I bought a cheap USB BR player for it.

 

I don't want to switch back to optical, either. They were a nightmare to use, and I'm glad I'm done with them. @__@;

I thought id need one but havent yet,When i built my pc black friday i bought a cheap usb drive just in case.Its march and i have yet to even open that drive lol

[Crunchy Dragon]

8 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

it's just no where close to as common a use case as it was 5+ years ago. 

Yup.

 

I'm one of the outliers as well, I still buy movies on DVD/BluRay and I still buy CDs, so my optical drive sees a fair amount of use each year, but aside from weirdos such as myself, nobody uses ODDs anymore.

[Jurrunio]

SFF desktops become more popular these days, they also care about size and weight. I have 4 HDDs in my ATX system cuz it doubles as a family storage dump and the whole thing is easily 25kg... Certainly too heavy to take on an aircraft without getting charged extra.

[da na]

People just don't use em anymore. Plus with glass front cases getting more popular, nowhere for it to go.

Personally, I don't use it much, maybe once a month but I still want one. My HP z840 workstation actually has a slot for a laptop optical drive in the front panel, so I just use that, the other two 5.25 bays are reserved for the RAID array disks I have mounted there.

[johnno23]

Simple answer was high speed net connection. the moment that tap was open streaming for movies and downloading of games became the next big deal.

Also it gained tremendous support from the industry as now you can subscribe which means they get money forever but you the client can on the surface get instant access and watch play anytime anywhere ... the only real downside is that you no longer own anything. 

[cmndr]

I can download/stream things now. 
If I need to install an OS, it's going on a flash drive. 

A 256GB flash drive is like... $20ish now. At that price, what's the point of a bluray? Serious question. If a blu ray drive is like $70 and a 50GB BD-R disc is $1.50... $80 gets me 1TB of flash drives and 0.3TB of BD-R. It's at around $100 that BD-R pulls ahead in capacity. And then I still have fragile discs that read slow. 

[Popo576]

I hate the concept of streaming. I like to have EVERYTHING physical or dumped on hdds. also M-Disks are SUPER reliable, and resistant to data rot and harsh conditions. of course you can put your entire library on a USB drive, but I work in IT and there are several occasions I had to put things on optical because they wanted it. DVDs are dirt cheap, and you can use them as a frisbee, bury them, use sandpaper on them and a resurface can make it still usable, now if you use a hard drive as a frisbee, your gonna get a head crash

[mononymous]

High speed Internet = Easy access to 1080p and higher content

Low $/TB HDDs = Cheap cloud storage

 

A decade ago, when I was in still living in Singapore, there was a VCD/DVD rental store in the condo area. For a teenager that was a great place to get cheap entertainment since it was only SGD2 for 1 VCD/week. I still had a need for optical drive back then because I would rip the files and view it on my devices. However once the shop owner retired I had no reason to continue owning an optical drive. Mind you I still had those 5.25" bay 1st gen BR drives just in case. My mother owned a portable one for a similar reason. My mother was working as a museum guide. For once or twice a year, she might have a need to watch legacy content for research and would use the drive.

 

The last time I used a DVD to install an OS was probably Windows 7. Since then I think I have used a USB drive to install subsequent versions. I have not bought a CD in recent memory only given one because they were music artists or DJs. 

 

Once fibre internet became more ubiquitous and when you can have unlimited data carrier plans, you worry less about carrying physical storage mediums with you. The only reason I carry a USB drive around is so that I can print using the university's facility. 

 

35 minutes ago, Popo576 said:

I hate the concept of streaming. I like to have EVERYTHING physical or dumped on hdds. also M-Disks are SUPER reliable, and resistant to data rot and harsh conditions. of course you can put your entire library on a USB drive, but I work in IT and there are several occasions I had to put things on optical because they wanted it. DVDs are dirt cheap, and you can use them as a frisbee, bury them, use sandpaper on them and a resurface can make it still usable, now if you use a hard drive as a frisbee, your gonna get a head crash

I can understand your point of hate against streaming because you are only given an opportunity to access the content. You have the right to hold such an opinion. However clients requiring businesses to offer optical disks is a separate issue to the needs/wants of a consumer. Since not every business does not require the use of optical media in their daily operation. For example if you were working in the government sector in the countryside of Japan, it was not too long ago that you would be submitting data to the bank via floppy disks¹.

 

Image Source: ServeTheHome

 

As a person who lives in two locations that are separated by a 7 hr flight. I don't think it is realistic to carry all my data in HDDs with me all the time. Also living in a natural disaster prone area like Japan, I wouldn't trust myself with having all of my data in physical media in one location. I would rather have multiple offsite backups but that would defeat your idea of having EVERYTHING under one's own possession. Since that would require some form of streaming data from a separate location.

 

Source:

1: https://japantoday.com/category/national/man-who-mistakenly-received-entire-town’s-covid-19-relief-money-vanishes

 

 

[Bombastinator]

Once upon a time disks were huge.  Now you can get a thumb drive for $3 that is four times the size and ten times the speed.   Once upon a time d they were huge and fast.  Now they’re small and glacially slow.  The use didn’t change but the media did.  As it does.  I’ve been through 4 or five.  I started on cassette tapes and moved to 5.25” floppies.  All of them were awesome when they arrived and totally outclassed by the time they were replaced.  These days a new media would have to have enough space on it to hold the largest single piece of software.  So around 100gb maybe, and it would need a transfer rate of at least near 5gb/s (closer to double that is better) to be viable.  Produce an optical disk like that, and people might buy it.  It wasn’t the opticalness or the diskness that was a problem.  They just got too small and slow.  One has to look at speed and $perGb.  Hard drives these days are about $45/tb and comfortably under that 5gb/s level.  Which is about half the cost and multiple times the speed of optical disks.  And they’re dying.  Optical disks just lost the race.  Like many other media types before them. 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Bombastinator

[SupaKomputa]

I got a stack of 6 dead cd / dvd writer from early 2000 till 2010, the last time i used those thing.

The drive broke too fast, like 1-2 years, i hate it.

Plus cd / dvd R dont last long if you play them often enough, totally bad storage medium.

I still collect some bluray movies tho just for novelty.

Thank god for USB thumbdrive and SDcards (also youtube, spotify and netflix).

[X-System]

It's been a long time since I've used my computer's optical drive but I bought ICY BOX IB-550StU3S for my old DVD-RW SATA because I could use it one day.

But for movies, I buy DVD / Blu-ray TV series and few Blu-ray movies (favorites). I watch them on my Panasonic TV & HDD Blu-ray in my living room.

 

Other movies, I recorded them on my Panasonic HDD Blu-ray (support up to 8 HDD 2TB USB. About 500 movies per HDD)

[Beerzerker]

6 hours ago, NF-A12x25 said:

nobody uses them

Hello - I'm nobody and I use them.
Nice to meet ya.

I have and use them because some stuff I've got is on disc and it's also a medium I use for creating OS install discs for my older stuff which also uses optical drives.
I mean sure, folks have mostly moved away from them since a USB drive is what many, if not most use these days but I do have certain needs only these can fulfill because of what I've got.
Use what you want or have to, you don't have to justify or explain it to no one but yourself anyway as to why or why not you'd use them.

[HorseBattery]

My internet is not great and I don't like the idea of having a bunch of subscriptions to streaming services, so I still watch dvds and blurays.

 

I specifically looked for a dvd drive in my current case, a Phanteks Enthoo Pro. Cooling is a non issue if you don't buy ridiculous power hungry high end parts and are willing to spend a little time tweaking and optimising. I don't even have a fan on the front, and my PC runs very cool and almost silent.

[Needfuldoer]

I still buy physical media, so most of my machines still have optical drives.

 

However, the discs I buy usually only get used once (to add their contents to my online archive), then stored away. I built a workstation PC specifically for archiving my discs (an Antec Nine Hundred with 4 BD-ROMs and 4 DVD+-RW), so it gets the most use.

 

 

I've got one semi-regular use for optical media: retrocomputing. Sometimes it's easier to simply burn a disc than trying to figure out how to bootstrap a machine that predates USB without one.

 

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, johnno23 said:

Simple answer was high speed net connection. the moment that tap was open streaming for movies and downloading of games became the next big deal.

Also it gained tremendous support from the industry as now you can subscribe which means they get money forever but you the client can on the surface get instant access and watch play anytime anywhere ... the only real downside is that you no longer own anything. 

i mean, yeah, downloading does have advantages,  but they don't really outweigh the disadvantages in my opinion,  because of that.

[Isuck Assimov]

Why are people not using Punch Cards with their Computer anymore ? what is up with that ?

[Holmes108]

The only physical media I use, is I'll still watch the occasional Blu ray (very occasional), but that would never be on my PC anyways, so yeah, I haven't missed it.

 

For the once in a 5 year stretch that I find some old disc and am curious what's on it? Well, I've just found I can live without it.

[johnno23]

26 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i mean, yeah, downloading does have advantages,  but they don't really outweigh the disadvantages in my opinion

it depends which side of the fence you are on.

As a consumer the consumers got shafted as they no longer own any physical copy and now the supplier can continue to remarket repackage and resale.

The supplier no longer has to pay for distribution no hard physical media and the profits are sim[ply immense so the subscription method was an easy to do and easy solution.

The consumer pays for the hard ware pays for the ISP and then pays to download and view a digital file that sits on a server. The consumer also does the same to play a game. that game you we i paid for is not ours but merely a license and permission to play the game that is offered as is and often under the excuse of early release to hide behind as an excuse for bugridden unfinished and badly optimised but rushed out the door to meet boardroom and financial deadlines.

No wonder the optical drives died a fast and sudden death. 

Dump info on a server let consumer pay for everything to use that data and then charge them money to access that data...A perfect.marketing utopia. 

[Uttamattamakin]

10 hours ago, Popo576 said:

Like I get laptops to like be thinner and lighter but why desktops? I use my optical fairly regularly for things like movies and music

Digital downloads and SSD's.  

Digital downloads meant you did not need a optical drive to get a copy of things.  Plus with SSD's and cheaper home networking we could move files around without an optical drive. 

Then SSD's and USB's got a LOT better than a optical drive.  An optical copy was a sort of backup for the HDD.  SSD's don't just DIE the way HDD's did.  Which is a shame since a clear copy securely stored on an optical disk in a cool, dark place (like in a safe) would be the best most secure archive of those irreplaceable bits of data.  

[Commodus]

10 hours ago, Popo576 said:

I hate the concept of streaming. I like to have EVERYTHING physical or dumped on hdds. also M-Disks are SUPER reliable, and resistant to data rot and harsh conditions. of course you can put your entire library on a USB drive, but I work in IT and there are several occasions I had to put things on optical because they wanted it. DVDs are dirt cheap, and you can use them as a frisbee, bury them, use sandpaper on them and a resurface can make it still usable, now if you use a hard drive as a frisbee, your gonna get a head crash

Let's be honest, though: most people feel differently.

 

If there's a show I want to watch on a streaming service, I just have to... start watching. There's no downloads to manage, no NAS or media server to maintain. Yes, you only have access so long as you subscribe, but many people don't watch the same movie or TV show more than a few times at most. If you think Netflix or Prime Video is expensive, try buying every video you'd want to watch and creating the home infrastructure to play it across your devices.

 

That and certain practical realities get in the way. I don't live in a huge house, and I have an infant son; I'm not going to use valuable space to host dozens of discs that could easily break. And with file sizes growing for everything, let alone 4K HDR content, even a 100GB Blu-ray can feel inadequate. An SSD or hard drive will eventually stop working, but it's easy to migrate that data to newer drives.