Time to ditch the optical drive, once and for all
Summary: Once heralded as the second coming of data storage, the sun has finally set on the optical drive as an effective vehicle for data storage and delivery. Optical drives are simply too small and too slow to be practical.
Once heralded as the second coming of data storage, the sun has finally set on the optical drive as an effective vehicle for data storage and delivery. Optical drives are simply too small and too slow to be practical. Single layer discs hold 4.7GB while double layer discs can hold 5.4GB.
Blu-Ray has more capacity, but its 25GB (single layer) and 50GB (double layer) doesn't hold a candle to the capacity of even a medium-size hard drive, let alone the 500GB monsters that have dropped as low as $100.
Apple hasn't released a Mac with a Blu-Ray drive, nor does Apple have support for Blu-Ray baked into Mac OS X. So even if you attach an external Blu-Ray drive to your Mac, you can only use if for reading and writing. You can't play a BD movie, for example, on Mac OS X unless you install a virtual copy of Windows. If Apple released Blu-Ray drives in Macs tomorrow, a case could be made for keeping optical drives in MacBooks a little longer -- for watching movies on a plane, for example.
At best the venerable optical drive is showing signs of age, at worst, it has one foot in the grave.
Apple needs to bury the optical drive next to the floppy drive, which Steve Jobs summarily killed with the announcement of the original bondi blue iMac in 1998. The future is to replace optical drive with flash media and downloads.
Snow Leopard should have been distributed on a flash drive and via BitTorrent.
I decided to take a leap of faith and installed an OptiBay hard drive (pictured above) from MCE Technologies in my MacBook Pro (late 2009) in place of the optical drive. Prices range from $189 for 250GB to $279 for a 7200RPM 500GB and the installation itself was easy. Just remove the bottom case, remove three screws, the optical drive and put the OptiBay in its place. Having a second hard drive in my MBP gives me gratuitous amounts of storage in place of an optical drive I barely used. From the OptiBay product page:
Now you can have unheard of capacities in laptop disk storage and space for everything you need to store... digital video, music, photos, etc. Two bootable hard drives inside your system provide a freedom and flexibility never before experienced in a Mac laptop... have one disk a scratch disk and the other your system/applications disk, RAID configurations, one disk Mac and the other PC, extra photo storage for digital photographers, extra music storage for digital DJ's, and more.
If you're worried about losing your optical drive, fear not. MCE includes an external optical drive enclosure for your removed SuperDrive so that you'll still be able to load software and read and write CD/DVD discs to your heart's content. Just pop your old optical drive into the enclosure, install two screws and you have a USB powered external SuperDrive. I'm keeping mine in my backback for a while, just in case.
Immediately after formatting the OptiBay 500GB HDD (a speedy Seagate Momentus 7200.4 mechanism) the first thing I did was move my music (100GB) and photo (30GB) libraries to my new found storage. Next I moved a 40GB VMWare virtual machine to the second hard drive for a combined savings of about 170GB. Whew! My SSD finally has some breathing room and I don't have to constantly use Disk Inventory X to save space.
For people used to large mobile hard drives, a second HDD may not exactly be compelling. However, if you've made the jump to using an SSD as your boot drive, a second hard drive in place of the optical drive is a practically a necessity. SSDs can instantly double the performance of your Mac but they cost significantly more than HDDs. The great news is you don't have to sacrifice capacity in exchange for raw speed. You can have the best of both worlds with an SSD and an OptiBay HDD installed in your MacBook Pro.
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Talkback
I agree
But, why are you asking the question about the Beatles?
Minor Correction
In regards to the article I think Optical Media is a media that is slowly phasing out but the cost of the media for most purposes is still very cheap. A 8.4GB blank disc is under $1 where an 8GB Flash Drive is closer to $15 based off retail pricing. Even in bulk for large companies to use that as a method of software distribution is not cost effective. Most software and video games can be distributed on DVD media which is cheap and easy to produce and very reliable outside of getting scratched or broken. Hopefully someday SSD and Flash Drive technology will be very very cheap and abundant but until that time I think you will see optical media live on for a while.
And what about archiving? How long will the SSD hold the information?
That is a good question
CD/DVD storage longevity specs are dubious
The other issue is hardware, as we have seen with other obsolete storage media, what happens when no one makes or has a device that can read the old media? Does anyone have a device that can still read 5" floppies? How is that bernoulli box you bought in 1995 doing, does it still work? Remember zip and jazz drives? Still using those? Good luck!
Commercial CDs are different
I noticed the same thing
I have burned CDs from 98
It also depends on the quality of media used
You also have to take care of them storage-wise. I store mine in slim-line jewel cases. Not in those exposed CD wallets that are (or were) so popular.
Floppy drives
Cool! :-)
not a proper comparison
http://www.google.com/products?q=5+1+4+floppy+drive&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=j2uySoeVHIPSlAfv6YCBDw&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1
5 1/4" floppy drives still exist, and if you really need one, you can get one. 3 1/2" floppy drives are still being sold brand new on Newegg and even retail at Staples and Microcenter. Zip drives are still floating around as well.
But more than that, floppy and ZIP disks were exclusively a data storage medium. It's the vast minority of people who have data EXCLUSIVELY on a floppy disk anymore; odds are that at SOME point they copied it to a hard drive, and the file has either hopped from PC to PC over time, or is still rotting away on a 15-year-old Seagate hard drive (which has an IDE interface and as such can attach to some modern motherboards or use an external enclosure). One must ask how important a file that hasn't been touched in 15 years would be if it's still sitting on a floppy disk or old hard drive. If they're still actively using the file, then it's either on a newer storage medium or they still have a floppy disk drive in service.
What makes CDs and DVDs different was that they are both a data storage medium and a content medium. If you want to play vinyl, you can still buy a turntable today. If you want to play a VHS tape, you can buy a VCR today. Heck, if you want one, you can still find a Betamax player (http://www.fullcompass.com/product/245241.html). Being as CDs have been around for over 25 years, and content formats that are 25 years old still have reading apparatuses available for purchase, and the fact that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players both play audio CDs (and the burners burn them as well), I'm pretty confident that in 2034 you'll be able to rescue data off of a CD-R (assuming the disc's data is still intact, but that's going to be an issue for virtually any storage medium short of stone or metal engraving presently used).
Digital content doesn't store well in comparison with 'analog' media in the sense that hieroglyphics are still legible (if not easily read), and even with some wear and tear it's still possible to read them after ~5,000 years. Digital data is significantly less forgiving in that regard, but that's a problem for virtually any encoded media.
Joey
I agree with you for the most part
I do!
things like that around for nostalgia sake. Like
my 8 track player, even though I only have two 8
tracks. Although I've still yet to find an 8"
drive that still works... I've thought about
trying to build one... while I do have a zip drive
I never got into them, I used CDR through that
fad, and I never considered jazz more than a fad
either...
How about....
Do you feel better now?
And you are wrong. Mac users DO care about cost. We know you get
what you pay for.
yeah really silly
everyone does, hdds are just better because you can reuse them, one
problem tho has been file systems and their usability without errors
when archiving huge amounts of data, i had 4 1tb drives and recently i
purchased another 2 1tb drives and converted all my old drives to HFS
plus, the drives were all ntfs and were becoming a nag
so if you get your file system working well and you keep the drives safe
in good enclosures you should be fine when it comes to archiving
Still Relevant
CDs and DVDs are cheap DISTRIBUTION MEDIA. Are you going to keep a box of 100 4GByte USB flash drives on hand to distribute small quantities of files to people? even if you wanted to, the cheapest 4GByte flash drives on Newegg cost $8 a pop, so while 100 flash drives will cost about $849, a spindle of 100 DVD-R media cost $25. Which will your accounting department prefer you order to shuffle data around on. Before you say "LAN, because it's effectively free", remember the old adage of "never underestimate the throughput of a station wagon full of backup tapes barreling down the highway". Depending on your end user's available bandwidth, it may be more effective to overnight a pair of DVDs.
Also, it appears that ZDNet bloggers as a whole (especially those who herald Cloud Computing as the third coming) forget that there are STILL people around with slow, unreliable internet access. Dial-up isn't dead, and even if it was, broadband in the US is abysmal compared to Japan, Korea, and most of the Scandinavian countries. Mobile broadband and tethering is becoming more and more popular, so even if you've got 50Mbits down in your office, you're lucky to have north of 3 or 4 on the road. Wanna download an ISO image on the road with that kind of bandwidth? And I DARE you to make some huge bittorrent swarm a standard means of transferring files...it's like Limewire, but without the tracker sites...and we all know how much ISPs are in love with that idea.
Optical media is also much easier to duplicate in quantity, especially for OS install media. I've never successfully gotten Windows to install off of a USB flash drive, but if I need to roll out Windows to 5 or 6 unique machines, duping the installation discs is almost always the quickest means to do it.
Finally, commercial DVDs are still the most popular means of purchasing movies, and as long as playing a downloaded movie purchased on a PC is more than simply a burn-to-disc affair, I don't foresee that changing. As such, having a DVD drive in a computer will still have that advantage. Downloads are getting there, but until they don't require all kinds of hoop-jumping or expensive boxes to transfer them to, optical media will still be the most convenient way to purchase a movie. Besides, after about 6 months on the shelf, most movies and TV seasons are less expensive to buy on DVD anyway.
Again, I agree that backing up to CD-R, DVD-R, and even Blu-Ray isn't really feasible anymore as a backup medium, don't think that its useful life is over. Floppy disks died because individual files we needed to transfer outgrew the medium (the majority of my files are bigger than 1.38MBytes, a few word documents and PDF's notwithstanding), they were unreliable (running Scandisk on them was almost a necessity, and even then your data's integrity wasn't guaranteed), and nothing else matched its simplicity. Once Class Compliant USB drivers were built into all the operating systems, it was easier than packet-writing a CD-RW, having a dozen copies of the same document on a multisession CD-R, and there was no 'click death' that became Iomega's trademark.
Joey
Disc Backups
feasible and easier to store off-site than a flash drive or - heavens forbid
- leaving it in the cloud somewhere.
Other than that footnote to your use cases, I fully agree.
RE: Time to ditch the optical drive, once and for all
obtuse. Um, hello, Jason, have you forgotten that full-
length films are stored and distributed widely on optical
media? Don't watch movies using a computer? Oh, that is
soooo '90s. Newsflash: today's Macs easily double as
media centers. I should know, mine are hooked up to 23"
and 42" screens. Until the day when broadband speeds
make the transfer of those movies temporally practical, the
optical medium isn't going anywhere anytime soon. And
therefore it's entirely too early to pronounce it obsolete or,
in the very least, irrelevant to computing.