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WOF: How often do you use your computer's optical drive?
[Weekend Open Forum] When Apple announced the first iMac in 1998 many were taken aback by the lack of a floppy disk drive. But it soon became obvious that it had been the right decision and shortly thereafter other manufacturers began to follow suit. The archaic technology was replaced by optical discs because they offered a lot more storage capacity at affordable prices.
With the proliferation of broadband connectivity and cheap USB flash drives we seem to be on the verge of another transition. The idea has been a tad slower to catch on but a few laptops have already dropped their optical drives for the sake of portability. With decent do-everything DVD burners going for less than 20 bucks and Blu-ray crossing the $100 threshold, optical discs are obviously going to live on for a while, but the truth is they are not as convenient as they used to be for consuming or transporting data and many of us rarely use them anymore.
Virtually all of my media and software today comes from online sources, and for doing backups I usually resort to an external hard drive or even the cloud. With that in mind we want to ask you: how often do you use your computer's optical drive? For those that use it regularly, what do you primarily need it for? And for those of you who don't, would you say you are ready to drop it altogether? Let us know your thoughts.
User Comments: 87
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Very rarely. Everything now is on the internet.
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ET3D,
Why don't you download this game from the internet?
I guess it will we faster
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very rare. sometimes i don't even know if it's there.
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Lokalaskurar said:
I use my optical drive all the time! I've pretty much everything I own on the optical format. Discs around here doesn't cost that much - $24 for 100 CD's or $36 for 100 DVD's. I lacked an Internet connection until recently - thus all my games (~70) from 2006-2011 were optical ones, none downloaded.
I also store tonnes of playbacked radio-content, in which I need more or less a library to keep track of it all, and CD's is much easier to store in a "library" than flash-drives (I think).
I even still use loads of Floppy-disks. Not 3,5'' - but 5,25''...
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I haven't used my laptop's optical drive in over 3 months. Honestly, I've been waiting for the technology to die ever since I scratched my first CD until I couldn't use it anymore.
I use a flash drive to transfer files between my laptop and my server (~10 feet away). It's a lot easier to transfer files onto a flash drive than it is to burn files onto a CD. In all honesty, I've never learned a fullproof method of burning a CD, every once in a while, it writes nothing on the damn thing.
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negroplasty said:
Don't have one.
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I keep just about everything backed up on DVDs, so quite a lot.
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I still burn movies to DVD for family every now and then. Though way less now, as in the last six months I have burned 5 or so. All movies.
A year go I burned hundreds and two years ago I was burning a few thousand a year.
Now I stream everything in HD from my computer. Was using an XboX 360 but now I use Boxee Box.
I went to using my external DVD burner 4 years ago though. None of my desktop PCs have a floppy or cd/dvd internal drive. Only my 2 year old ASUS laptop has a DVD Super drive. And probably used it twice, only to install Ubuntu.
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Yep, me too. BDRW backups, BR & DVD & CD rip and burn. It's vital.
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i just gave away my optical drive a month ago because i used it very rarely. all my needs are satisfied by usb drives which are very convenient and external hard drives
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yowanvista said:
Once or twice a month
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Funny. I remember when I got my new computer back in 2002 was the first time and since then I am not using floppy. Everyone was surprised about my decision.
To be honest after I saw this question I've just realized that I havent used my optical drive in the last 3 years. Even when I installed new OS I just installed it from HDD or USB. Never backup anything to DVD because its too small and I have plenty of HDD.
The rise and fall of optical drive was much much faster than floppys.
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Games are the only source that uses my drive...Make me kinda sad really when i think about it.
I'm not fully trusting with flash drives (if i wanted to hold vital data) since two of mine have been corrupted lately through "unknown" means.
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my optical drive works only when i do a clean install of o/s and driver, nothing else needs it except reaping media files which i seldom do
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I would like to point out that most Operating Systems are provided Via Cd or Dvd so taking out the optical drive would pose a large problem when trying to switch your os.
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Mizzou said:
Still use mine a few times a week to watch a couple of movies along with a weekly backup. Most of my CD's have been converted to mp3 so it doesn't get used as often as in the past.
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spikester48661 said:
Once or twice a month if I can.
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TitoBXNY said:
I use it rarely these days, In fact it was unplugged since the summer. Just plugged it in because my Boot Manager got corrupt a few days ago.
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To install old games sometimes or if I buy a game in store on release day. Steam offers better updating thought - regret my non steam copy of bc2. I got some dvds from blockbusters the other month and watched them using the dvd drive. But games that require the disk are a real drag nowadays.
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Very very rarely. Maybe 4-5 times a month.
I still like to have an occasional back up of very important work on DVD's, generally every 3 months or so.
I certainly don't rely on my optical drive.
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Maybe 2-3 times a month, mainly to load new programs or to rip CDs/DVDs. Occasionally I will burn a mixCD to listen to in the car, and backups of all my pictures are burned on DVDs. But for most games that require a disc in the drive, i've either been able to find a fix online to bypass the DRM, or I have been able to mount an image of the disc.
I actually have two drives, a DVD-ROM and a DVD burner, but seems like kind of a waste now that I think about it. On my first computer I got in 1999, I used to do a lot of copying directly from one drive to the other.
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wizardB said:
Use mine at least 3 or 4 times a week but then I still use a floppy drive now and the
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Once every few months to rip a CD or two
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only to ever install windows, and thats it.
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I use it all the time when needing to send large photoshoots to customers with picture files being 24mb a piece and 400mb Tiffs most. It is still the cheapest process for this and my client base and models. Other than that I don't use it at all.
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