CD drives - why bother?

For some while now my Iyonix has been the only computer in the house with a CD-drive. My wife’s laptop has no provision for a CD. Only very rarely does the CD-drive on the Iyonix get used. Very soon the Iyonix’s PSU may give up the ghost and I will be doing what I used to do on the Iyonix on the Raspberry Pi. Common sense says that the weight and size of CD-drives has sent them to the great retro-museum in the sky to join the tape-drive and the floppy drive. On the other hand manufacturers of peripherals stick stubbornly to providing drivers on CD; though I suspect that a lot of the software on them is just advertising and padding, with installers for downloading the useful stuff from the manufacturer’s website. So is it worth lashing out on a USB CD-drive for the Raspberry Pi?

Don’t think so. Never had a CD drive on my BB-xM and only would have needed one to install RO software annoyingly supplied on CD (in one case I even received a floppy!). How about keeping the carbon footprint small and supplying a download link instead, eh? I actually did try to get an old and unused external CD burner running but had to give up. More out of curiosity and because I had it anyway. In the rare case when I really need a CD, there’s still my old x86 running VRPC. Just transfer the data from there. Like every once in a blue moon and certainly not worth buying a compatible USB drive. You can mount ISOs btw using !CDFaker.
Obviously Steffen Huber won’t agree with me ;-)

I won’t disagree in general ;-)

There are still a few valid use cases for optical storage:

• as a non-magnetic and non-flash backup/storage medium
• as a maximum-compatible data transfer medium, especially for old hardware
• as a playback medium for multimedia data (DVD, BD)
• as a cheap and compact storage medium with reasonable data security

And of course it is indispensable for your HiFi nerd, because he wants to keep his High-End CD player running ;-)

However, in this day and age of extremely large harddiscs and USB sticks, usage is certainly on the decline.

On the other hand, drives and media are extremely cheap. So no great loss to buy that 30€ USB DVD writer.

I also won’t agree with Patric ;-)
It is better my children use a copy from my cd-collection ;-)
I burn the camera picture collection and bring this to the shop to make real pictures. The photoshop in our village must also live.
I have any old “gold pieces” on CD.
My children become CDs in school to learn at home…
Watching DVD works also a little bit…xmen .
;-)

as a non-magnetic and non-flash backup/storage medium

The same would be true for punch cards ;-)

as a maximum-compatible data transfer medium, especially for old hardware

While I could buy a Cumana parallel port CD drive for my two-and-a-half ARM powered A4K
fitting a network card turned out to be cheaper and far more versatile.

as a playback medium for multimedia data (DVD, BD)

Can you use multimedia and RISC OS in the same sentence?

as a cheap and compact storage medium with reasonable data security

TBH I’m not convinced about optical drives being a cheaper solution esp with hard drive prices or cloud storage in mind.

I burn the camera picture collection and bring this to the shop to make real pictures. The photoshop in our village must also live

AFAIK these machines happily accept SD cards like most digital cameras. Other than that I print my own photos, you know like real men: using an enlarger and dark room ;-)
But yeah, it’s good to have the possibility of using what is now becoming a legacy device. It just doesn’t seem all that important to me personally so I’ll rather invest those 30 quid in some new software.

The same would be true for punch cards ;-)

The thought of watching an episode of Shinsekai Yori by swapping punch cards fills me with horror. What is the data capacity of a punch card? We’re looking at 200K for about 24 minutes. Is that even doable? [hint: it would be around three and a quarter million of the IBM-96 cards; passing through at approximately two and a half thousand per second]

fitting a network card turned out to be cheaper and far more versatile.

Indeed; my machines that need to share stuff are all networked. Hell, even the A5000 has a network card in it, not that I ever use it, but…

TBH I’m not convinced about optical drives being a cheaper solution esp with hard drive prices or cloud storage in mind.

I would say they are safer and more reliable. I can drop a DVD-R on the floor. It should survive. If it is scratched, there’s a good chance of recovering the data to burn off another. Likewise while organic substrates don’t quite tally with the “lasts forever” and hundred year guarantees; if you keep an eye on your collection, you can image and recreate any DVD-Rs that don’t look right. Finally, I can play a DVD-R (or the contents) as often as I like. I can set The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (commercial DVD) to repeat play and just leave it running. Forever. After a length of time, the player will give up the ghost. Assuming the player didn’t burst into flames, the disc will be fine. I extract it from the player and put it into another.

With a harddisc, there is not only a finite service life (look at your warranty card – what is it, three years?) but due to moving parts there is a realistic life expectancy as well. Plus the fact that all of the disc is in use just to watch one film or listen to one song. When the bearings fail or the motor burns out or the heads die, the whole drive is now just a piece of complicated-looking scrap. Without special laboratories and loads of cash, NOTHING is recoverable.
Then there’s the fragility. Anybody care to drop a harddisc from waist height on to a solid floor? I’m not even asking you to do it with the drive powered up. I could do this with a DVD-R and there’s a very slim chance it will crack or shatter; risking the loss of whatever was on that one disc. With a drive, even powered down you are taking a big risk; moreso that you are risking a lot more capacity/content as well.

So, while it is a bit of a pain to have 4.4Gb optical media and 250Gb harddiscs; I believe that the DVD writer still had a place. The only thing I think will supplant it is a Bluray writer, once they become commercially viable for the masses.

AFAIK these machines happily accept SD cards like most digital cameras.

Just be paranoid and set the write protect tab.

Those photobooth things tend to run Windows XP. I know, I’ve crashed enough of them¹. I wonder if they are protected/configured to not obey an autorun.ini file in the root directory? ;-) Try one that does something innocuous like fire up Notepad…

Other than that I print my own photos, you know like real men: using an enlarger and dark room ;-)

I was interested in that once. It was always so expensive, and I find the sort of stuff that would interest me but be complex/time consuming is a doddle in a basic photo editor.

The only thing I am having difficulty with is having my screen and the printer agree. I could calibrate, but there doesn’t seem much point given the wide range of conditions I use the computer in (right now, it’s on my tummy as I like in bed yawning (it is 2am!) and the room is lit by a single halogen lamp on the desk pointed to the ceiling – it’s a pleasant yellowy light). Doubly so as my mother and I when discussing the printout mismatch can’t even agree if it is too blue (mom) or too green (me). <sigh!>

It just doesn’t seem all that important to me personally so I’ll rather invest those 30 quid in some new software.

Or, ironically, you could just forget the legacy device and get a new machine of the Pi ilk for that sort of money.

I was going to fix up my RiscPC. Why bother? I have a Beagle which does all the RPC did and more plus blows it out of the water for speed, and… okay, it was a gift so it cost me nothing, but to buy one I think it probably would cost less than a new StrongARM processor card.
I was going to build myself a little 6502 computer board (what sort of geek hasn’t built their own computer?!). Why bother? The RaspberryPi costs less than the basic chip in the 6502 board, and the comparison of what-does-what just doesn’t bear thinking about… 2MHz vs 600+… yeah… okay… ;-)

¹ Something I did not appreciate at first. My phone has around 3000-odd digital photos on its microSD. But not only that, it also has downloaded scanlations of several manga series. These total a further 7-8000 jpegs [I don’t think I have ~8000 pages; they must be split images or thumbnails, or something!]. Most photobooth software attempts to start thumbnailing all of that, and after a while, either the machine freezes and the watchdog kicks in to reset it, or the front-end software crashes and the watchdog kicks in to reset it. And it’s a bummer when that happens because the authentication check for the bank card reader takes forever. Thankfully the one I usually go to does thumbnails on demand, so if I just stop before I get to the scanlations, it won’t do anything with them. It’s just a shame there is no control over the folder/path/filename. I know where my files are, and I generally have a good idea about filename (like “fifth from the end of the list”). I just have to wade through a rubbish UI that wasn’t set up to deal with thousands of images; yet this situation will get more common as the smaller size SD cards are disappearing…

I´m not go to a machine. Sorry, it is a woman in her “Tante Emma Foto Laden”. And she has a darkroom and so on for normal film. But not for Digital Pictures ;-) The CD is going to a laboratory. The pictures are better as in a big shop (ALDI, Rossmann, DM…). I don’t no why.
Self printing is not a option for thousand of children’s pictures ;-)
Multimedia… yes, look at my link ;-) Or look at my A5000 with IRLAM 24i16 ;-) Ok, I hope there is more possible.

Well I had some video. It was too big to email, and while I could have uploaded to a web site my upload speed is slow so, as I did not have a spare memory card, burning a dvd and posting was still the easiest option of getting the content to the recipient.

I recently (finally!) put my PandaBoard ES into a case.

One of my criteria for the case was support for an internal optical drive.

The reason was because when I buy new music I buy a CD as well as the vinyl version (if possible) so that I can then rip it to 16/44 WAV for playback on my portable digital music player.

All of us in the hi fi industry agree that the distribution of digital music is in a state of flux at the moment. For the most part though the highest quality digital version of most music you can obtain still arrives on 8cm of compact disc.

Unfortunately the big players in the music download distribution market do not understand the concept of anything beyond compressed…

Before anyone says it yes there are a few labels / distributors offering better than 16/44 but they are not mainstream.

So for now, there is still a need for an optical drive.

Same way I do with my preferred music.
Also, If we want one day to have a video-player-solution based on RiscOS, the source will presumably be DVD or BlueRay disks. Which leads us back to gpu driver support…

I guess it depends on how much data you need to access from (or put on) CD. I still have a lot of resources (fonts collections, magazines etc.) on CD-Rom so personally a CD/DVD Rom drive was high up my priority list when moving over to Beagleboard/RPi. It is also, in my experience, quicker to burn a backup copy of important things on hard disc to CD-Rom than to memory sticks or cards. I use CD-RW (or DVD-RW) discs so they can be erased and re-used.

What is the data capacity of a punch card? We’re looking at 200K for about 24 minutes. Is that even doable? [hint: it would be around three and a quarter million of the IBM-96 cards; passing through at approximately two and a half thousand per second]

Somewhere, someone, quietly, is planning to do just this. Imagine the fun of building a power-feeder for a stack of cards that size… I guess with a very high speed camera and a suitable optical system one could probably do it without actually having to stop the card which would help a lot. It looks like around a 400ft high stack. I see high impact performance art project here.

“…IHS also points out that optical-drive manufacturers are facing their own challenges, what with laptop makers eschewing them in order to create slim Ultrabooks – even desktop PCs such as Apple’s anorexic iMac line are saying farewell – and with consumers turning more to video streaming over DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
“Optical drives could eventually be abandoned by PC makers altogether,” IHS writes.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/04/ihs_hdd_projections/

I guess that won’t be neccessary. After all you can still buy brand new DD or even 8" floppies (at least you could- at a price- two years ago) and aftermarket USB DVD drives will be available for some time. It just won’t be mainstream anymore.