2023 is full of streams. We play music and movies from various affordable cloud services. Internet connections have become faster, you can buy Internet storage for reasonable money. Do optical media still have a place in such a world? Some may be playing DVD movies they bought a long time ago.
But today we are interested in whether you are still actively burning. Optical discs can still make sense for one-time backups, especially if you don’t trust clouds and hard drives. Do you still own a burner? If so, do you use it or is it just an inactive part of your computer accessory? What, if any, do you store on optical discs and what media do you use?
Lukas Václavík
I have but I don’t use it anymore
As recently as last year, I had a Blu-ray reader combined with a CD/DVD burner in my desktop, but I didn’t use it for a long time, so I removed it, which brought two advantages. Better cable management and no noise when starting the computer (the mechanics always buzzed a little).
I always have it in my closet, as well as the USB/SATA converter, so I can use it whenever I need it. But I’m rather considering whether to buy an external Blu-ray burner. Mechanics cost zero zero nothing, single-layer 25GB media are for a few crowns and that kind of capacity would be enough for me for occasional backups.
And since I also service other older computers and other electronics, I don’t like to give up these conveniences, because what if they still come in handy. That’s why I also have a FireWire card (for DV cameras), a USB converter for analog video (just recently I digitized VHS and an 8mm camera), a universal reader for all kinds of memory cards, ATA and SATA converters, etc. I just don’t carry floppy disks anymore. 🙂
Jakub Cizek
I do not have
At home, I said goodbye to all CDs and DVDs back in 2008, when I bought a new 13″ laptop without an optical drive. Today, I only use the shiny wheels as a fairly functional (albeit hideous) scarecrow for overpopulated pigeons in our block of flats.
I still have a DVD burner at work, but I don’t use it in practice. The reason is simple. Affordable recordable media was often of such tragic archival quality that I unread most of it when moving to NAS and later to the cloud and lost many prehistoric backups for good.
Filip Kůzel
I have but I don’t use it
Hmmm, I have a feeling he’ll be around somewhere! …but I haven’t seen her in quite a few years. It’s an external Samsung drive, but I don’t even know if it only burned CDs or DVDs. In other words, I’m completely out of the optical media game, the player is only in the car.
Karel Kilian
I have but I don’t use it anymore
I was one of the first to have a CD burner. At that time, I paid more than four thousand crowns for it, which was almost half of my salary at the time. I still remember how my friends came to burn music CDs at my place, and one – that is, if the magazine didn’t leak – took about an hour. In a way, it was actually such a social activity.
Later I bought a DVD burner and backed up movies and other data to optical discs. However, over time I moved away from this solution, and the moment I bought my first disk array, I completely abandoned it. After that, the burner was only used to burn movie DVDs for my dad, who played them on a classic DVD player.
Today, I have a burner both in my desktop (hardly used) computer and in my work laptop. It doesn’t work on the PC anymore – it’s probably covered in dust. The one in the laptop probably works, but I basically have no reason to use it. I have all the data on the disk array, and if I need a boot medium, I will prepare it on a flash drive.
Petr Urban
I do not have
Technically, I should choose that I have, because I would still find an ancient drive from Asus in the cabinet, which, however, only read and burned CDs. But I can’t count that anymore. She was very good, I have fond memories of her. It recorded 16× and in good quality. Of course, I still used DVD for a few years, but it didn’t work for me. After a surprisingly short time, many of them were unreadable.
The blue optical discs had already passed me by completely, I felt that this round medium was becoming outdated. I started saving data on external drives instead, which I also got rid of. For many years, I prefer to back up to the cloud. I’ve been throwing away optical discs for the last ten years, and I haven’t actively used the mechanics for maybe those ten years. I don’t know exactly.
It was connected on the desktop for a while, then I disconnected it due to lack of cables and finally donated it. I also used DVD drives from Asus. I remember reading mechanic reviews with interest maybe fifteen years ago, but burning and reading CDs and DVDs left me long ago.
2023-08-14 17:45:19
#optical #media #burner #home
