Forum Home
PC World Chat
Thread ID: 98727	2009-04-04 23:37:00	Are optical drives obsolete?	jwil1 (65)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
762399	2009-04-05 06:15:00	When I attend our photography club meetings, I just use a memory card with a USB adaptor reader. Many others just use a USB dongle / key. I may get one in the future, I have never own one thou :D the trend I see from them is that in the past they had some CDs but over time, they just used USB memory dongles. At the end of the year presentation we get a CD, sure but for the last year we didn't get one. We didn't get a copy at all. :illogical	Nomad (952)
762400	2009-04-05 06:15:00	Another form that no ones mentioned - what about media centers, you still need to have an optical drive to play Rental / purchased DVD's - Blueray. If you have to download a movie in BlueRay DL format it would take a huge chunk of your usage per month, not to mention time if the disc was almost/Full - 50GB per disc. Until ISPs stop charging by the GB and implement flat rate usage. Tui!	johcar (6283)
762401	2009-04-05 06:53:00	I don't use them much and I voted they are not obselete, while we may not use them as often, we still need them to some essential things.	Nomad (952)
762402	2009-04-05 07:53:00	Yeah, for entertainment media, still DVD a lot. For data, it's USB all the way for transport / sharing and multiple HDDs for storage. I do not trust burnt DVDs for long term storage. It will be interesting to see how well USB and solid state 'drives' age - whether they go corrupt at 5 years, or if they generally are still 99.99% reliable at 20 years. From what I've read, they can't be entirely trusted either, and the areas that get written most often (like FAT table or equivalent) are likely the first parts to die.	Paul.Cov (425)
762403	2009-04-05 08:10:00	For long term storage solutions I still use my printer and optical drive, not necessarily together	gary67 (56)
762404	2009-04-05 11:38:00	Not exactly obsolete, but declining in their life / uses perhaps. I know a guy who used 128MB Flashdrives as high-tech business cards to impress the high-value (or potential spend) clients. I rarely watch DVDs, buying them online through iTunes is more convenient for me (Ive spent hundreds since getting my iPhone, simply because iTunes is convenient). I never keep my "rescue" files and apps on a CD any more, all PC's since WinME support thumbdrives with no mucking around, and since XP's well and truly mainstream it makes life even easier in that respect. Still, I had to convert a friends wedding film onto DVD just this afternoon. The video file is fine for archiving on her PC, but to give to people, many simply dont have a Media PC. BluRay is also a bandwidth killer in countries like NZ ...	Chilling_Silence (9)
762405	2009-04-05 19:49:00	My parents just went back to the UK a week ago and I converted all their video footage to DVD so that they can play them to their friends when they got back used up 5 DVD disks in total they aren't going to learn new things at 72 and 69 years old	gary67 (56)
762406	2009-04-05 20:16:00	I think disks still have their place. Sure, for ISO's virtual drives aer great, but you can't really use one of those to install an OS (with the exception of VMs). But I agree that thumb drives and memory sticks are starting to replace some of the uses that cd/dvd-rws filled, mostly because of the (albeit small) effort involved in making them. It's a certanty that they will disapear, just a matter of when.	ubergeek85 (131)
762407	2009-04-05 22:00:00	One word. (or is it two?) Blu-Ray. For this reason alone Optical drives will stick around for quite a while. I assume a Blu-Ray drive is considered to be an optical drive? Other technologies are still too dear to make them viable, although that is changing as we speak. (Bring on SSDs etc...) For backup using disks is just silly now though.	wratterus (105)
762408	2009-04-05 22:13:00	Blue-ray is as obsolete as the CD, It was obsolete before it hit the market. The only reason we have them is the big companies govern the market as best they can, and shiny spinning discs have earned them billions. Discs is an utter crap medium, and giving them higher capacity doesn't fix their flaws. Its ridicules in this day and age with the technology we have we still have to use a mechanical device that spins pieces of plastic and insane speeds to read the data. Wouldn't it be easier to go to the "DVD" store,pick your movie from a drop down list, have it transferred to your memory stick, go home, Plug it into your TV,watch the movie? I only refer to going to a DVD store as NZ still won't have capable internet in the next decade.And media compression in all its forms sucks balls.	Metla (12)
1 2 3