Would you trade an internal optical drive for better GPU?

Yes I've seen nearly every other component minus the CPU fail before the optical drive. Things usually go in for in this order: bad HDD, bad motherboard, bad RAM, bad LCD/inverter/cable, bad keyboard, bad speakers and then bad optical drive. There are only few manufacturers of ODD these days anyways.

 

No.

CD quality = best.
DVD collection = want to be watched on the go.
Linux Live CD/DVD = preferred over a a bunch of (possibly expensive) USB sticks.
DVD use as a storage medium = important.
Ease of storage = convenient.
Having a hard copy of anything in worst case scenario = priceless.
Collector value of CD/DVDs = fantastic.
For 'legacy' games needing the CD = useful.

For me, an optical drive is very important. The things above are subjective, but they are what they are for me, anyway.

 

Oh I can already do that with my current notebook, I just said I'd like it to be standard on notebooks if the market does believe that ODDs aren't something everyone needs.

 

For me optical drives + recordable media are by far the most unreliable part of my PCs. Next would be one artifacing 9800 Pro video card. Not a single one CPU/mobo/RAM/HDD has ever died on me yet ever since I built my own PCs from 2001.

I remember even as early as six years ago in college, everybody was using flash drives to carry their data around school even though they were a lot expensive than a typical DVD-RW and also a far lower capacity (64/128MB vs 4.7 GB). It was never about price, or GB/$. Simply because flash drives were so much more compact, more convienient to use, more compatible (quite common to see perfectly fine media not working on a particular drive and vice versa) and far more reliable.

Today, between $5 4GB flash drives, $100 2TB external HDDs and Internet content delivery its not hard to see even with Bluray, ODDs are pretty much dead in the PC market. Steam is a million times more convienient than installing games from DVDs. Even MS has a official tool to let you install Win 7 from a flash drive.

 

Well then you are incredibly lucky or you have extreme bad luck with optical drives. I've only had 1 Hitachi start to fail on me, given it was 3 years old and I was a stupid college student back then. I've never had RAM fail on me but normally I upgrade it so fast I may never notice lol. I've also been building custom PC's since 2000 as well, I can tell you I spend that extra money for higher quality parts? Why? Because it its a better investment on the long run.

But yeah I meant that for newer laptops. Unfortunately laptops are cheap and cheerful these days. People scream for faster computers, and to be cheaper so quality gives out. What I tend to find:

Dells for the most part are problem free, the typical HDD going bad, but mostly Dell have problems with touchpad/trackpad/keyboard. But at least they are quick with those repairs.

HP/Compaq I tend to shipout back for warranty repair, 20% have extreme overheating issues, 5% bad LCD/cable, the occasional bad hard drive, and their AC bricks have a high failure rate. Hp are also quick with those repairs.

Gateway/Acer/Emachines have problems GALORE. Bad RAM, bad HDD and bad motherboard are the most prevalent issue. Those 3 account for 80-90% of shipouts for warranty or parts ordering. AC adapters are also crappy, but at least you get a big pool to order from (HiPro, Lite on and Delta lol). I also tend to see they have bad OS from the factory, and usually are reimaged 30-40% of the time, though many users are dumb as well. Parts and repairs tend to take a little longer than Dell or HP

Toshiba also have problems galore, ranging from bad hard drives, bad AC adapters, bad motherboards, bad LCD/cable. And there's the infamous Toshiba recall for the DC input jack (just google it).

Sony usually are worry free, minus hard drives dying really quick and AC adapters going bad but pulling teeth from a dragon would be easier than order warranty parts. Plus their entire North America part ordering system is down so we can't even order parts, it must be shipped to Sony for warranty repair even if it has a bad HDD or AC adapter.

Everyday I probably order anywhere from 1-3 warranty HDD. Usually 1-2 bad AC adapters, all brands.

 

I've got an Envy 15. I already did trade an internal ODD for a better GPU I rip all my movies for our media center PC anyway, and all of my games can run without a CD (yay Steam!), so... I have a barely-over-5lb, very portable gaming and multimedia machine.

 

i would trade for better GPU for sure but hey 5870M is great ... i really need optical drive so might get external if it happened

Panther214

 

Optical drives are incredibly overrated. Anyone with a desktop and dameon tools can easily get around it, and external drives are so affordable now. I survived for years without even an external on my old tablet.

That being said, they are convenient, and most users are not going to mess around with making images, nor do they want to deal with externals. I do not think we are going to see optical drives disappear anytime soon, but we may see more models without them (as we already are in the netbook category).

 

Some people (I would say most of the general populace) want a computer that "has it all". It's much more convenient for the average joe to have everything he needs on his notebook, including an optical drive. I think that's why they aren't going away any time soon, unless some other emerging technology is a viable replacement for optical discs completely.

 

I disagree. CD quality is not the best. The trick is to make a lossless rip of the CD. If you actually play music from a CD, then you are subject to whatever the optical drive reads on that pass through. A proper lossless rip can do error checking, so the theoretical maximum quality is the same but the realistic quality level is higher with the lossless rip. Additionally, you can have very high quality mp3 v0 music files that have essentially perfect quality and take a fraction of the space, if you prefer them.

You could rip a DVD collection the same way you do with your CD collection. Using handbrake + vlc you could convert your dvd collection to h.264 and take it with you, and keep it well organized with a software video library program (itunes, windows media player, others). In addition to having easier access to your movies on the go, you also get better battery life playing them this way.

You can get a 4GB flash drive for $5 or less, and use it to boot linux just as you would a linux live CD. However, when the next version of linux comes out, you won't have to buy a new flash drive, you can just put that version of linux on your usb and maintain an up to date version of your linux live USB. Additionally, linux live usb *can* (you have the choice) support data persistence.

I would rather get a portable 500 GB - 2 TB hard drive that works over usb for $60-120 than have a massive DVD spindle and sharpies for data storage. Finding your data is faster with an organized file system than hunting through a stack of DVDs (hopefully marked well). You can write, read, and erase data on the hard drive, whereas with DVDs you write one time. Hard drive speeds are much faster than optical drive speeds. I think this makes a good argument that a portable hard drive is more convenient than DVDs.

Optical media is damaged and destroyed more easily and more often than a hard drive in my opinion. Scratch = done.

CDs and DVDs may have collector value for collectors. That is true.

Some old games do require a CD. Sometimes, there are ways around this, steam has a nice library of old games, for example. Gotta love steam.

 

You don't have to use sharpies. Since I switched to lightscribe, there's no going back.

 

I love my lightscribe and am honestly surprised it has not taken off more. I have to say the biggest disappointment in all the laptops I looked at was the lack of lightscribe. Okay, maybe it was poor resolution, but come on how much does it add to include lightscribe ability?

 

Can't you do error checking when you play straight from the CD? I do agree that high quality MP3 is like 99.9% of perfect CD quality. Also some music is available in higher than CD quality. But either way, most of the time, the hardware is not enough to make the most out of high quality audio anyway.

 

lol.. i don't have a desktop... anyways , external optical drives are not that portable but ok.. still a hassle compared to pressing 1 button and your CD playing..

Panther214