Why did people stop liking optical drives in their desktops?

[thrasher_565]

they make a good template for cutting a 120mm fan hole...

 

i paly the shit out of the games we had and my dad would get mad at me when they were scratched... but we only had 4gb so it was 2 games. my sister got the rest for mp3... and my mom for w/e it took to install word...

 

we were poor so getting stuff free saved moeny but steam games got so cheap i gave up and just buy em now. thow prices are not that cheap any more... but there are games on there that dont play any more... one good thing about a disk.

 

but there many advantages to have digital over a disk. steam was probably the thing that killed game cds. and mp3 for music.

[dight]

most people pay for subscription services instead of buying local media so most don't need an optical drive. with the rise of ssds you usually only get a couple of drive mounts as well. which is fine for most. especially when the drives are under the shroud. the modern design aestetic for gaming pcs is to be incredibly minimalistic. so 5.25' bays have to go so they can keep that look. some cases (especially antec cases) used to have a door that would reveal your optical drive bays and maybe even hot swap hdd bays. have 2 optical drives in my ryzen pc and my case is like 12 years old. i'm in a stupid niche that likes ripping discs at a breakneck pace but it's kinda weird how few modern cases have optical drives. most that do are crappy low end "gaming" cases that would be dented by a dust of wind and the few that do are kinda hard to find and still not as feature-rich as i wish they were. long live my cm 690 ii.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

5.25" optical drives just up too much damn space. I just bought a bunch of music CDs but no longer have a drive in my system. Maybe if disks were still widely used, case manufacturers would've had slot loading drive options.

[RoseLuck462]

At least for me, USB storage just got a lot better and higher capacity and cheaper.

[thrasher_565]

19 hours ago, dight said:

most people pay for subscription services instead of buying local media so most don't need an optical drive. with the rise of ssds you usually only get a couple of drive mounts as well. which is fine for most. especially when the drives are under the shroud. the modern design aestetic for gaming pcs is to be incredibly minimalistic. so 5.25' bays have to go so they can keep that look. some cases (especially antec cases) used to have a door that would reveal your optical drive bays and maybe even hot swap hdd bays. have 2 optical drives in my ryzen pc and my case is like 12 years old. i'm in a stupid niche that likes ripping discs at a breakneck pace but it's kinda weird how few modern cases have optical drives. most that do are crappy low end "gaming" cases that would be dented by a dust of wind and the few that do are kinda hard to find and still not as feature-rich as i wish they were. long live my cm 690 ii.

you can have both 5.25 and fans but case with a solid front became poplar. at the end of 5.25 there was like only 2 things to put there. aquacomputer controller witch cost too much and br drive witch at the time a ps3 was cheaper. since hdd became cheap and big then need to have many is not needed. then the temperd glass became the norm and then finally we did get air flow case back...

 

even thow case like the antec 1200 could have 4x 120mm fans people also liked having a psu shroud so case like that were retired that and tempered glass.

 

there is not a really good cheap ish server case for thows that want the hdd space. there a few that sold cadys but at a prity hefty price... of cores 3d printers could make something but dont or cost just as much...

 

another thing is case got wider longer for gpus

 

the roswill rise glow is probably the most modren case you will get. there the pop air as well.

 

 

[TacoSenpai]

A fair argument too is that you can get USB Optical drives (even blu-ray ones) fairly easy.  So even if you had cds, dvds, or blu rays you have that option to use them while also not taking up space in a case or having to hook it up to a PSU and SATA connection.  I have one myself.

[nhand42]

My last build had an optical drive. When I retired the system after 5 years I realized I'd never used it. My current build doesn't have an optical drive.

[it_dont_work]

9 minutes ago, nhand42 said:

My last build had an optical drive. When I retired the system after 5 years I realized I'd never used it. My current build doesn't have an optical drive.

I've always had one basicly since the time they'd come onto the market. I still use it every now and again, and will probably keep my case as i can use one with it. 

 

But honestly I don't see why anybody besides some rare uses, actually needs one. 

[8tg]

I have an assload of CDs and I still only have a usb optical drive.

it’s just not really necessary, even if you have a lot of disc media you can get a cheap usb drive and it’s just as good, even the cheap ones these days are pretty fast

 

 

[SimplyChunk]

My media PC has an older Bluray in it now.  I used to use and external DVD drive i knocked together with a cheap 5.25 dvd drive and the guts of a USB2 external hard drive.  When i got the Bluray drive it didn't work with the internals so i had to swap my media PC in to an old Phanteks case that still has a 5.25 drive bay up front.  I just use it to rip DVD/Blurays though I then watch them on my main PC through a shared drive with the media PC

[Rex Hite]

I keep optical drives in most of my work workstations for a few reasons; much of my expensive older software is on CD; I still get requests to create discs; I often get requests to copy client discs to other storage because they got new machines without optical drives..

When I add new workstations to my shop I re-use old cases and if they have a space for an optical drive, I fill it. I also find that discs fail in odd and inconsistent ways where some drives read them and some don't, so by keeping a few drives available I can always get a disc to read by trying it in different machines. I also keep zip, Jazz, superdisk and floppy drives handy for the same reason. Every so often a desperate client shows up with some obscure media they used in the 90s and early 2000s.

[SimplyChunk]

Anyone remember LS120 drives?

[Erioch]

I probably have 4 or 5 internal DVD drives of various types in a box in my garage.  My last 2 or 3 PC builds didn't even have a place to put one in the case.

[Mitko_DSV]

I still use CDs and DVDs ocasionally. Come to think of it I own 11 PCs and all of them have optical drives except one (I bought it cheap with bent pins in the CPU socket, fixed it, tested it briefly by installing Windows 8.1 from DVD to a SSD, then took the DVD drive and SSD out of that PC and it's been sitting for months). And for laptops it's a different thing - I have two small laptops (10.1" and 11.6") that don't have optical drives, one HP EliteBook 8470p where I replaced the DVD drive with a dying 1TB HDD and my other 5 laptops have optical drives in them.

At work (I work at a public school as the IT guy) I prefer using CDs and DVDs to load stuff to the PCs since I have no idea if they have viruses that could transfer to an USB stick, where the CD/DVD is safe from that. Though they will be replacing the current PCs soonish (currently using Core 2 Duo, Xeon from the same era or Sandy Bridge and Haswell systems, almost all of them have ODDs).

[Seccedonien]

Optical drives, I still have some of those lying somewhere upstairs. They were slow and all the disks would take up space or I would lose them because I misplaced the one I needed and hadn't used in ages. For personal storage I went to USB HDD's and a HDD dock as soon as I had discovered those but for a long time I kept moving over my optical drives because of CD's and DVD's being a thing while I just never bothered getting a BR/HDDVD drive and the need for optical drives just naturally disappeared completely for me.

[Shin-Gouki]

I have an External Bluray Burner under the front of my case but I am a musician and do some mastering for people and they want actual CDs

 

[emothxughts]

Software and games, people just download them on the internet. Music, people either stream them, download them, or buy vinyl if they want physical.

 

External optical drives are quite cheap these days, just buy one, plug into a USB port, put the drive on top of the PC case and call it a day...