a mere 10 years ago CD and DVD drives
were a staple and present in virtually all PCS nowadays you could be forgiven
for forgetting about your old loyal friend entirely since most laptop
designs omit them in favor of Slimmer form factors many custom Builders leave
them out to Save A Buck and apple no longer sells a single Mac with an
optical disc drive but how did such a popular format go from near Universal
adoption to being suitable for nothing but protecting tabletops history lesson
time in the 1980s the most popular existing format for music was the
cassette tape an analog technology that you couldn't copy without losing quality
managed only mediocre sound Fidelity required manual fast forwarding and
rewinding and always seemed to get tangled up in your player at the worst
possible time CDs changed all this by allowing music studios to use digital
recording for much better sound quality and and easier reproduction and thanks
to their low production cost and greater data capacity CDs also made a huge
Splash in the PC World with most software moving from multiple floppy
discs to a single CD in the box then
when CD burners or writers became available they were the bee's knees for
data backups since they held nearly 500
times as much data as a standard high density floppy disc and only about an
order of magnitude less than hard drives at the time and it didn't stop there by
switching from infrared to lasers that
use shorter wavelengths of red light on DVDs and then devising methods to cover
the entire surface of a disc with data then have another layer under it for
double the capacity and then finally by switching to the blue light used on
Blu-ray discs Optical made it possible
to jam up to 100 GB of highquality
movies with surround sound onto a disc the same size as an original CD not to
mention that they're so cheap to produce that even Moore's Law hasn't been able
to make USB drives or SD cards
competitive so we're all the way into this video we still haven't answered the
question then why did such a versatile medium lose so much ground to things
like online streaming services are we really just too lazy to take our discs
with us and stick them into a player well maybe but that actually isn't the
whole story first of all Optical discs while definitely better than tapes do
deteriorate moisture from the air can get into the metal layer that contains
the data and cause a reaction that damages the disc not to mention that
user created discs are written using dyes that break down over time unless
you're shelling out for archival grade media and the discs aside the drives
they go in are fragile too like mechanical hard drives an optical disc
has a lot of moving Parts but unlike a hard drive which sits in a sealed box
inside your computer Optical drives have to constantly open and close making them
susceptible to user error and wear and
tear especially compared to solid state drives or ssds with no moving Parts at
all but even if all your precious equipment stayed intact nearly all other
modern data storage mediums are faster than Optical discs anyway with even
high-speed internet catching up and surpassing them thanks to services like
Google fire okay lonus I get it they suck so then
why do I still see these things all over the place well Optical discs haven't
gone away completely despite these drawbacks because content Distributors
still like Optical discs thanks to physical media being easier to lock down
with DRM which you can learn more about here CDs and DVDs are still much cheaper
than putting things on SD cards or flash drives like I mentioned before Gamers
can sell optical disc copies of games between each other much more easily than
ones they've downloaded making it preferable especially for console Gamers
and audio files can enjoy lossless movie audio on Blu-ray for example something
that even if streaming services did offer would be way more than the average
us internet connection could handle anyway so while comparisons to other
modern technology might make it look like shiny discs are dead it may
actually be a while yet before we're all making disco balls out of our old CDs
but if you were going to make disco balls out of CDs maybe you'd want to
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there's another reason that uh Optical drives uh have kind of we've had to find
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Techquickie and to you guys for watching I guess that's pretty much it
like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment uh if you have suggestions for
future fast as possibles and don't forget to check out some of the great
videos that we've got on our other channels uh Luke for example just
finally did a review of the r9390x why did it take so long well
maybe it has to do with our excitement level I guess you'll find out check out
that video now