DVD or Blu-Ray drive

Ollivander

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Feb 12, 2020
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Is it still worth buying an optical drive for DVDs or should I just opt for Blu-rays? From what I have researched, I understand that all of the external drives for DVD's have a maximum read speed of 8x but there are Blu-ray drives that can read DVD discs much faster. Is the faster read/write speed actually beneficial if I only plan on occasionally accessing old discs with movies and programs?
 
I would get a Blu ray drive since you can read those then too if the need ever arises, that's what I did even though I still use an internal drive I bought an external one while they are still around :p
 
For playing a disc, it only needs a speed of x1.

Anything faster is only necessary for reading data from a disc. Read and write speeds vary based on media type. Standalone DVD drives should have equivalent speeds as a Blu-Ray model. The biggest drawback to external drives is the interface (ie: USB), especially if you only have USB2.

In any event, buy what you need, not what you may need.
 
What year is this?

From what I can tell it's the year of the 33rpm vinyl album. You could go more forward thinking and get an 8-track or go straight to cassette.
 
For playing a disc, it only needs a speed of x1.

Anything faster is only necessary for reading data from a disc. Read and write speeds vary based on media type. Standalone DVD drives should have equivalent speeds as a Blu-Ray model. The biggest drawback to external drives is the interface (ie: USB), especially if you only have USB2.

In any event, buy what you need, not what you may need.

good luck getting 30MB/s out of an external drive
 
If you have 5.25 bay on your case, get a sata blue ray drive. Especially if you are going to be ripping all of your physical media into a NAS that runs plex.
 
Optical disk drives are getting more scarce now, but I use an external one with a USB interface. I only have one use and that's for ripping movies to network storage. Optical disk is the only viable source for keeping your own digital library. You can buy movies for streaming, but then they are tied to the content provider, don't actually have a digital copy you can store where you want.

In terms of using optical disk to store data, they do have the longevity thing going if you use the long life ones, but that's about it. Otherwise they're slow. You just can't beat a USB SSD for portable storage. It's what I use for that.

As long as they're still releasing movies and other content on optical disk, it's still relevant. So optical disk is not yet obsolete and has not yet gone the way of vinyl and eight track.
 
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I actually thought about that, vinyl is still in use. Personally I don't see the draw, but people like what they like.
 
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