External cd drive is so cheap it’s almost free.
Drives are cheap
There’s some slight benefit to having games that are just a sticker with a license number in the box. Probably, the only one benefit though.
Until they remove it from the store.
Despite only having a few disc drive dependent games, this and the amount of USB ports is why I got the budget desktop I got around a couple years ago. Having a disk drive has been great, especially when I got a few CDs and don’t feel like using the old Sony Discman I got because it sometimes just stops after certain songs.
With powered hubs and balanced tree topology, you can split a single root controller into 45 endpoints. Your motherboard being able to support that many devices and the shared bandwidth might be a problem, but it’s theoretically possible to survive off of a single USB port.
A USB DVD Reader/Writer costs 15 bucks. (I’m too used feel like that meme, and then at some point I needed to find a way to get a Mini-PC to read CDs, and as it turns out it’s quite simple - I reckon it was more a case of “can’t be arsed to do it” than a case of “can’t do it”).
I wonder how long that price will last. We might be living in just the right time to buy a boatload of optical drives.
🏴☠️
Simgolf
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there’s no physical eject button. It Just Works!
I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.
I just bought an external cd/dvd drive so I can convert my DVD library into a digital one for convenience and to preserve the dvds longer.
I’m having some issues with the speed of conversion, but my biggest problem is quickly becoming storage space.
Also, I dug up some of my old games like Caesar III and installed a no-CD “patch”.
Good times.
There’s an adapter or replacement for everything
I actually have a SATA cable and power plug discreetly tucked in a spot in my PC case and have just taken the side off and plugged in a drive on occasion. It’s normal purpose is troubleshooting other hard drives, but it works for that too
I’ve got DVD-ROM drives in my desktop PC and my old laptop that I use for playing videos while I exercise and a USB Blu-Ray drive that I can use in anything else. You’ll get my disc caddies when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
I technically have a DVD drive/burner still. It’s just not in the computer because the case didn’t have any drive bays for it and I couldn’t find one I could afford that had even one when I built this machine. I could just run it outside the case but… Nah.
Black and White
If you out the CD in the microwave for 15 seconds you can shrink it down to the size of a SD card, the SD card slot will read it.
I accidentally went 18 seconds and got a microSD, just be careful of microwaves with different power for the correct parameters, but this is known to work
You know that this answer will be mashed into an “AI” training set somewhere.
I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can’t wait for AI to bring that shit back.
The piano PS3 has this issue with the same workaround
I have an internal DVD-RW drive, but I disconnected the cable to use it for a new HDD I bought a few weeks ago
You unplugged a DVD drive to plug in a hard drive?
What does it feel like still living in 2010?
Yes. I didn’t have extra SATA cables
LOL I hope you have at least one NVME SSD to run the OS at least.
I do have that. I have been through the pain of running the OS on an HDD with my old computer and ever since I got an SSD, I can’t return.
USB external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.
