WOF: How often do you use your computer's optical drive?

[Jos]

[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.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/42694-wof-how-often-do-you-use-your-computers-optical-drive.html

 

[Guest]

Since I built my water-cooled rig two years ago, about three times. USB-booting support has made the optical drive nearly useless now. Only other time I used it was last week when I need to rip a music cd into my library.

 

[Technochicken]

I have an old game I play occasionally that requires a disk to run- mounting an image of the disk does not work- and I rip CDs/DVDs every once and a while.

 

[TechGreek]

I built a new rig for my desktop and people always ask me why I don't use an Optical Drive anymore.

Answer #1) My internet is just as fast as transferring CD files.
Answer #2) I can boot off a flash drive, which, I have quite a few of them.
Answer #3) I use external drives for everything

I do have an external DVD burner for just in case moments and keep a CD case still for all of the computers that can't boot to USB.

 

[red1776]

just to burn pictures for my grandmother who recently upgraded to a CD player....from her VHS...beta-max no less, and her Victrola.

@ Jos, you should start a "who still uses a Floppy drive ?" thread. I bet the answer is rather surprising.

 

[Guest]

I use it 1-3 times a month. Mainly to create CD/DVDs for various uses.

 

[princeton]

I used it to burn a copy of "The most dangerous game" for my old teacher yesterday. The previous time was installing win7.

 

[Lurker101]

Last used to install a bunch of drivers.
Still use it regularly to rip CDs and install games
Will be using it very soon to burn and install Debian 6.0

 

[red1776]

I used it to burn a copy of "The most dangerous game" for my old teacher yesterday.

Thats not very nice at all Princeton. I'm sure he/she knows they're old...They don't need you reminding them of it!

 

[insect]

Very very rarely. In the future I doubt I'll have one.

 

[Guest]

didn´t use optical discs for about 5 years, usb and pxe can do everything i need...

 

[Jurassic4096]

barely ever. maybe 6 discs a month, usually to DVD-RW's.

 

[herpaderp]

I use the ODD maybe a couple or more times a month on my own system, and for mostly non-essential tasks (music/program/image for friend who doesn't have a flash stick handy), so I wouldn't be sad to see it go. However, they are still a necessity if you do tech support since you never know how old a system someone will bring you :\

 

[Guest]

Not even once a month.

 

[Guest]

All the time. I rip blu-rays and DVDs onto my hard drive

 

[Tekkaraiden]

Whenever I reinstall windows, I've never quite figured out booting windows off a usb drive.

 

[Guest]

the real issue is ODD's in laptops, as there is a space constraint. only a small number of laptops overall don't have them, and those laptops are mostly netbooks/ultraportables. I'd like to see laptops as big as 15" having ODD-less options. the space in the laptop isn't worth it, as I can easily use flash drives and other mediums for the same purpose without wasting space. if I ever do need to use an ODD, I can just use an external drive. I would much rather have extra cooling, better case stability and and other options available such as a second SSD/HDD.

here's a question, if you were a laptop manufacturer, and nearly every laptop made went without ODD's, would you buck the trend and put on in your laptop? my guess is not. at this point, I think ODD's should be an accessory, not a staple.

as far as desktops go, an ODD usually isn't in the way of anything, so unless it is, may as well keep it. I still don't use mine very often, maybe once every 3 months.

 

[mccartercar]

What is this optical drive you speak of?

 

[Guest]

I rip a few CDs on average once a month. Having uncompressed WAV files is nice. I never really liked buying music digitally but have never had a problem buying physical CDs.

 

[cyriene]

Many times a week. With netflix I watch blu-rays on my pc. Also, my study books have cds which I use. Although I get a lot of software online I could not be without my ODD at this point in time.

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

I think the last time I used it was for my windows disk...

 

[arkantos]

I use my optical drive (dvd-rom) regularly as my cd player, I have a bunch of original music cd's and still collecting until now.

 

[Guest]

I don't have a TV, so my most frequent use is watching DVDs on my laptop. Ripping the DVDs would take up a lot of hard drive space for content that isn't frequently replayed (unlike music). Also, the streaming selection on Netflix is limited and some people rent DVDs from Red Box, etc.

Normally I download music from iTunes or Amazon MP3, but occasionally I buy music CDs in order to use up gift cards. Those are immediately ripped and put away.

An external optical drive would probably be fine for me, but I'd need two because I'm a college student who goes home every few weekends.

 

[TeamworkGuy2]

I use it quite a bit, mostly for games. If I remember correctly, BF2 used to require a CD, before one of the patches, maybe patch 1.41 or 1.5 changed that. Spore requires a CD, so does Command and Conquer Generals, and Star Wars Battlefront.
Drive gets a little use playing DVD.
Also, I use it when I play AudioSurf to play some music CDs.

 

[ET3D]

24x7. Really. I'm running IsoPuzzle on a somewhat defective DVD of Finding Nemo. It's been running for two months or so now, and is only at about 60%. I'm curious if it'd manage to recover the data completely or not, so I let it run.

When I'm done with that I'll still use it, because I record DVR spill-off onto DVD and then rip it to PC and put in on a disk. A little backward but it's the convenient way to go.