To Disk Drive or not to Disk Drive

[TehCookie]

If they got replaced with another physical media I would be fine with it. Like if you bought software on USB drives or something, but I need something physical. Though I'll always want a CD drive since I burn music CDs to listen to in my car. Even if music went DD, my car hasn't.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Whats the benefit of not having a disc drive besides a possible small price reduction?

Weight and thickness, the disk drive being one of the thickest components in a laptop. It also frees up internal connectors to do other things with, the Thinkpad and some other business lines can have hard drives or additional batteries fitted there.

OT: I'm probably not representative since I'm an IT administrator but I haven't used a disk outside of work for years except to load old game off of.

I see I must admit I wasnt thinking of laptops only home PCs so I get your point but I still find the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. My brother has a discless laptop or Notepad (whatever they call em) and the difference in thickness between them is very small, personally if I didnt care about having a disc drive I would have bought a tablet.

He dosent really use the comp for many things but not buying a comp with a disc drive is something he really regrets as he cant put his CDs or watch his DVDs on there which he enjoyed doing on occasion before.

 

[ForumSafari]

I see I must admit I wasnt thinking of laptops only home PCs

In that case I don't know, maybe to save sata connections for hard disk drives but it may just be a cost cutting thing. It might just be because with Steam and USB sticks people just don't really use disks any more.

My brother has a discless laptop or Notepad (whatever they call em) and the difference in thickness between them is very small

Partially that's because they're cheap and so aren't manufactured to a high spec. If you take a look at something like a Macbook Air or an ultrabook they're very thin.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'll put it this way: I still have a floppy drive.

They have pills for that now. Though if your floppy remains fixed and mounted for more than four hours, you should call your IT provider.

...Sorry, but how often do I get to break out my floppy disk jokes these days?

I'm seen as a pretty tech-forward type, but I'm not even close to ditching my disc drives. They're still plenty useful, especially since there's still a decent chunk of media I can't legally aquire digitally.

 

[porous_shield]

I would never ditch a disc drive with a console but I'm not so a disc drive is of limited use to me. My current computer does not have a disc drive and I haven't missed it while my old one had a disc drive and I can't even remember the last time I used it.

Steam and GoG are fine for me and I have my games backed up. I have a slow internet connection so it takes absolutely forever to get my games downloaded but I also live in a rural area hours from anywhere I can buy games so it actually faster to download them since I don't go into town that often.

Just about every older game I have that requires a disc drive I have through GoG or Steam anyway.

 

[Aesir23]

I would say no, but only because of my personal feelings than any objective analysis. I like my media in physical form, mostly so I feel like I actually own this thing that I spent money on rather than just borrowing it for as long as the service is running. Not to mention that, in the case of the PS3, it serves a dual purpose for my family. My siblings and I use it for gaming while my parents use it for movies. Much cheaper just to buy the one machine for both purposes as opposed to buying a game console and a DVD/Blu-Ray player separately.

On the subject of physical vs digital media though, the only exception I usually make to my "I want physical media" thing is if there is a Steam sale. I may primarily be a console gamer but even I cannot resist a good Steam sale.

 

[Auberon]

Let's say I have a thing for physical editions, be it movies/games/music. So naturally I keep an optical drive, and the one game I installed from disc - Skyrim - took 30 minutes for the entire thing. If I had to download those 10 gigs, it would be somewhere between 1,5-2 hours.

 

[Raioken18]

Most of the latest and greatest computers not including an optical drive are ultra thin laptops that are not particularly fast, with battery life and weight being the only advantages they have. Apple is also ditching them on all of their products, probably so they can make more money on their App store and iTunes. You can get external DVD drives that connect via USB if you do need one for one of those computers.

For desktop systems, it's easy enough to add a DVD drive if you want to, they only cost $20 or so, so removing them doesn't save you a ton of money. Price is only really a factor if you are talking about BluRay drives, and only consoles use BluRay discs for software distribution, on computers BluRay is only really useful for watching movies.

They're good to keep around, just in case you need to use the Windows install disc for recovery purposes, or need to load a driver from a CD when you don't have internet access for whatever reason.

Right now my most used optical format is BluRay, which I use because I don't have an internet connection nearly fast enough to stream full HD content at any reasonable speed. For people with slow internet or prohibitively low bandwidth caps, discs are definitely still useful, especially with games that have constantly ballooning space requirements. Some titles are exceeding 30GB, which may take ages to download, and eat through 25+% of your monthly bandwidth cap.

This is basically what my thoughts on the subject are.

Meanwhile a few of you had good points about how it influences computer recovery... I'd like to point out that this is already an issue with keyboards as you can't boot safe mode with a usb keyboard...

I assume much the same thing will happen in the computer repair scene where you will get charged extra for the repairs where they need to install a temp disk drive to reformat. As they currently charge through the nose to do what is basically a safemode run XD, well $90 is the cheapest around here, service only.

But for laptops... most laptops are already repairable due to their design issues... they've just been welding boards together, saw one recently the cpu was welded in. Basically they want you to have to buy a new computer when yours breaks. Which is why you tend to pay less for those computers, but not by much, short term it's alright but long term we know who comes out on top.