WHY ARE OPTICAL DRIVES DISAPPEARING?
It was the entertainment industry that helped drive the massive success of CDS and DVDS, so it makes sense that music and films are also behind the format’s decline. Where once people bought CDS and DVDS in their billions, they are now eschewing physical formats for the convenience of media-streaming services.
Figures released by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) earlier this year show that music CD sales fell by a whopping 23 per cent in 2018. During the same period, the Entertainment Retailers Association ( https://eraltd.org) notes that UK music-streaming subscriptions grew by 37.7 per cent.
It’s a similar story with DVDS, where subscription video on demand (VOD) services, such as Netflix, now account for almost two-thirds of the homeentertainment market, according to the British Association for Screen Entertainment ( www.snipca.com/32144).
This has led many major US retailers to stop selling CDS and DVDS, while in the UK, HMV blamed its recent brush with the administrators on the collapse of the CD/DVD market.
The move towards streaming might be bad for the high street, but it’s a win-win situation for the media companies, since downloads and streams incur virtually no distribution costs compared with physically shipping discs around the world.
Similar factors are affecting the format’s decline as a computer storage option. Software and games, for example, which used to be distributed on CD/ DVD-ROMS, are now more commonly available as downloadable files from online stores. And, in terms of raw data storage and backup, the trend is towards online (‘cloud’) storage services which, providers argue, offer a more reliable, secure way to storee and share files than recordable CDS and DVDS.
Meanwhile, a shift in PC form factors has led to CD/DVD drives being dropped by a number of computer manufacturers. The prevailing fashion in laptop design these days is for ultra-portableable models and laptop-tablet hybrids – neither of which have the space for bulkyulky disc drives.
What problems does this raise?
Given how quickly things change in the world of technology, it was inevitable that we would see a shift away from the optical media format at some point.
But that won’t be of much comfort to those people who still use their CD/ DVD drive.
When PCS stop being able to read or write to optical discs, people can’t install old software or watch DVDS that they’ve paid for. They won’t be able to read the data on discs they’ve used to back up to, effectively losing access to their own files. And they’ll lose the ability to burn photos and videos to discs, not that anyone else would own a device that could read them.
Most of us have dozens, maybe hundreds of CDS and DVDS in our homes, so if PC manufacturers kill off support for the format, they could be rendered all but useless. Thankfully, there’s still life in the old optical format. And, if you’re clever, there are ways you can guarantee accessibility to your CD/DVD collection for a long time yet.
Buy a PC with built-in DVD drive
While reader Dave Knight was unable to track down a laptop with a disc drive in PC World, it’s still possible to find new computers that have one built in – you just need to know where to look.
Many Dell laptops and desktop PCS still come with an optical drive as standard, such as the Inspiron 17 3000 (from £726, www.snipca.com/32207, pictured below). We also recently reviewed (and awarded four stars to) the Toshiba Satellite Pro A50-EC laptop (see Issue 557, page 24, www.snipca.com/31863), which comes with a disc drive.
Another option would be to buy a custom-built model. Outlets, such as PC Specialist ( www.pcspecialist.co.uk), let you tailor your laptop’s specification to your needs before you buy, including, in most cases, offering the option to add an optical drive (see screenshot above right).
Buy an external drive
If the drive in your current PC is broken, or if you’ve bought a computer only to discover that it lacks an optical disc drive, then you could buy an external USB disc drive. These are portable and cheap. Amazon is currently selling these drives from around £15 ( www.snipca. com/32209).
Even if your current drive works fine, you should consider buying a cheap external disc drive, as a way of futureproofing your disc collection should your current drive fail.
There are a couple of things to watch out for when you’re buying, however. Firstly, make sure the drive supports the formats you need. There are numerous recordable disc variants, including CD-R, CD+/-RW, DVD-R, DVD+/-RW, DVD DL (dual layer) and DVD-RAM. Most modern drives offer a broad level of compatibility, but check before you buy.
Do you need the ability to read and/or write to Blu-rays as well? Blu-ray drives offer higher storage capacities (25GB per disc, 50GB for dual-layer discs) and the ability to watch HD movie discs, but cost a lot more – around £100.
Potentially more useful is a drive with M-disc support, such as the Asus Zendrive External Ultra-slim (£23 from ww www.snipca.com/32216). MM-discs are writable DVDS (and Blblu-rays) that offer to protect yo your data for up to 1,000 years. We We’ll take a closer look at disc life expe expectancies on page 53.
So Some portable optical drives don don’t come with an independent powe power supply – the idea being that they draw power via the USB connec connection.
But often PCS aren’t capable of supply supplying enough power via their USB sockets to keep the external drive
powered. This can usually be fixed by using a USB-Y cable to draw power from two USB sockets simultaneously (assuming your PC has enough spare ports). Some drives come with such a connector as standard, but, if not, you can buy one separately for around £8
( www.snipca.com/32208 – pictured below).
Build your own DVD drive
You may not need to buy a new disc drive if you have an old PC you no longer use. Instead, you could cannibalise the optical drive from your old computer and convert it into an external USB drive by installing it into an enclosure or caddy.
The precise procedure for removing your old PC’S optical drive depends on the type and make of your device.
With a desktop PC, you’ll usually need to remove the side and front panel, unscrew the drive from its seating, then unplug the power and data cables and slide the drive out. With laptops, it can be a little more involved – you may need to take the entire casing apart to gain access to the drive, although some models are built with so-called ‘hot-swappable’ optical drives that will slide out from the main chassis after you remove a couple of screws from the underside or pop out a small catch (see photo above). In some cases, you may then also need to remove the drive from a metal housing case. Refer to your laptop’s instructions for more details.
With the disc drive freed from its old home, it’s usually a fairly simple process to install it into an enclosure. Bear in mind that the cost of an enclosure won’t work out much cheaper than buying a new drive, particularly if you want to convert a 5.25-inch optical drive from a desktop PC.
Slimline enclosures for laptop drives start at around £10 online for something like the EHZ-SHOP Optical Drive Enclosure ( www.snipca.com/32147), but the cheapest 5.25-inch enclosure we could find was the Icy Box IB-550STU3S, which costs £47 from www.scan.co.uk. Think of it as more of a recycling project, rather than a cost-saving exercise.