Uhh, because I have a working optical drive. Am I in the minority now? Doesn’t get a ton of use but every now and then I have to rip a DVD I own because it’s starting to die.
Not sure about the minority now, but you will be in a few years if not already. Prebuilt PCs haven’t included optical drives as standard for years now, and good luck buying a new laptop that has one.
Optical media isn’t dead but it’s on life support and will become functionally obsolete in the next decade, same as what happened to magnetic media.
I have one as well in my PC of Theseus, it’s been an ongoing part for more than a decade now. But, I also haven’t used in in a year or more.
It’s kinda funny to think back at how excited I was when my father first installed a CD-ROM drive in our home PC and knowing I could now get some of the newest games which were coming out on PC at that time. And now, I don’t even know if my optical drive is still working.
My pc sonetimes doesn’t start up, i assume the psu is wonky or something stupid like a wonky power button connector. I started to look into it and was shocked when i saw that my pc has a optical drive hidden behind a little hatch. I completely forgot about that. But also shows how much i need it.
I have two that are constantly hooked up to my mac! One for ripping and burning CDs and DVDs (which I still do regularly, in fact I ripped five audio CDs just today) and one for ripping/burning 4k/blu-ray. I occasionally use both at the same time to make copies of discs, but my need for that is for part of a hobby project.
I got an internal BDXL drive and flashed firmware to make sure I can rip the 4K discs I started getting as part of physical bundles. Still need to start getting NAS drives to be ready for when my main PC stops being my daily driver+Plex Server before I had to get a new TV that could view them (still don’t have a dedicated player and annoyed the PS4 Pro didn’t ship with 4K playback). For now I can at least hook my PC to the TV if I really want to watch a disc.
No, my pc doesn’t have an internal optical drive…. But doesn’t everyone have a usb portable drive?
Who isn’t keeping multiple vintage pcs? I keep a core2 system with a floppy and disc drives to deal with old media. It even has parralel and serial ports in case I need to deal with old hardware like zip drives. It has internal sata so it can boot from an ssd.
External drives are cheap. Got one working on the Steam Deck.
What else am I supposed to fill my shelves with? Books?
Pfffffffffff
added a cd/dvd read/write on my pc for $25 new, mostly so I could install my old permanent license Photoshop CS6