I was browsing a technical store’s website and came across some DVDs. On sale. You’d need an optical drive to use them, unless you use them to decorate your walls
If you do use them, what do you use them for and why do you not just use hard drives, SSDs or USB thumb drives instead?
This is not a hate post. My whole existence is living in the 90’s, so… :P
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No, and my only readers are on the old workstations I use as servers. Bigass thumb drives just do more better and have since 16 gigs made a thumb drive bigass
No, and I no longer have any optical disk readers. My last disk reader was on an XBOne and that’s long gone
I used optical disks almost entirely for music and video content but gave up once convenience of streaming media caught up. The thing is I don’t care about owning any. If don’t really have music or movies I like listening/watching over and over so buying doesn’t make sense. My comparison to streaming is broadcast. I’m paying $20/mon for essentially radio but without the inane chatter, ads, and unrelenting repeat of pop music.
Edit: in response to another comment - even for operating systems, I have gigabit fiber so download it as needed whenever possible
I use blu-rays, but that’s it
I use them to burn DVD’s that I can play on my PS5. I rip discs more than I burn them but sometimes I’ll make a copy of a rare disc or an .iso I found online.
In theory I still do.
In practice, so rare I basically don’t.
Top reason: Operating systems.
Secondary reason: Backup artwork or research.
But, no, I don’t. I’ve been lax. Pendrives and big drive on hand.
Would be good to get back to some DVD backups of important things.
BD-Rs for cold storage, they are cheaper than HDDs/SSDs and offer a fast solution to clear up space from existing hot storage without actually getting rid of the data. USB sticks are not suitable for archival, they degrade very soon.
Too bad they are on the way out…
I still have a couple DVD drives. They’re both disconnected because the PCs they’re in both got new motherboards at some point in time without an IDE plug 😅
I used to have one of those little joke .exe files called Cupholder. If you clicked on it, it opened the CD drive.
Why use CDs in this day and age ?
I’ll occasionally make a DVD for a friend of a friend who doesn’t have a device that can play files directly.
Other than that, I don’t use em. Could probably benefit from storing stuff on them as backups though.
who doesn’t have a device that can play files directly.
In the 2026th year of our Lord and Saviour ?
Not for them. It’s still 1990
Only reason would be when buying music cds. Besides that: None really
I have a small library of music CDs, because I liked music before there was an internet. I recently ripped them to .FLACC.
I keep meaning to do this, but do I really want to buy a dvd reader just to try to rip all my older music and movies that I seem to be getting along without?
Actually, a more likely reason is baby pictures. My mom was trying to be forward thinking and sent copies of all the pictures she took of my kids on cd-r or Kodak picture disk. Those are more important
Fuck bud I still use floppy disks. It’s damn hard to find a pc with a dedicated floppy drive. Those usb floppy drives fail writing to floppy more often than not.
I have a desktop floppy drive with a USB adapter. It seems to do the job.
Cool! Are floppys still being manufactured? I’d love to make a rescue boot floppy for when I need to do maintenance on my system!
They are not being manufactured anymore but it is still possible to buy new old stock. One guy is trying to keep them in circulation (he owns floppydisk.com) and I found a somewhat recent article that has some good info as well: https://www.raconteur.net/technology/the-floppygeddon-cometh
Yeah I kina lucked out I found a 10 pack of new ones on Amazon about 2 years ago. And recently, while cleaning out an old auto performance shop, there was like 2 or 3 55gal drums full of used and new floppy disks.
Also more recently there was something about Japan finaly upgrading their i.t infrastructure from floppy disks to more modern tech.
Hell apparently they still make cassette tapes for use in prisons because you can’t make a shank out of one with the materials they use for them.
Casettes are being reintroduced in the (indie) music industry as well
Yeah it’s really bizarre seeing my teen get excited about buying cassettes and vinyl
I started buying CDs from Japan and on the used market (thank god discogs).
Pretty weird :D
I have a stack of blank CD-Rs. I mostly bought them for running homebrew and import games on my Dreamcast. Recently I did find some old PC games that wouldn’t work under WINE, so I ended up using some of the CD-Rs to reinstall Windows XP on my Thinkpad T60. That took 8 discs.
I use them for archival backups of personal media.
And why do you prefer this over USB sticks (thar are dirt cheap nowadays)?
A CD-R will retain data longer than a USB stick.
USB sticks don’t last as long
Mostly because I already have a burner and two 75-count spindles of blank DVDs.
Sweet! I still haven’t started doing offsite physical backups. I do have backups locally and encrypted in a third party cloud, but no physical copies…
Offsite Backups of Family Photos
Your descendants will thank you! :D
If they can find an optical drive.
Those look good, they are gamingfavoriten!
