I updated my PC just a week or so ago. Finally moved away from a case with external drive bays. That case was just not able to keep a 3080 cool.
Honestly, I had a Bluray drive in there that was not used in so long, that on my previous upgrade four years ago, in that case I forgot to reconnect it and only found out last week when I was taking it apart for the re-used parts.
I have a blu-ray drive that I use once or twice a year to rip a movie. 5 years or so ago I was the weirdo that has both a blu-ray and dvd drive in my computer, as I was ripping my entire movie library.
But how do you load the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows 🤓 hehe
I'm in the same boat honestly, I have a lot of stuff on disks still but I just pull out an old optical drive from the box if I need to read them, or an old laptop or tower or whatever that's got an optical drive.
I do wish booting live USB was a little more universally easy though, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse compared to live CDs, these bloody TPMs and weird bios stuff getting in the way are a real pain. But overall, disks have had their day.
I do still use long term Blu-rays for bulk 10-plus-years cold storage backup though! Wouldn't trust flash or HDDs for that.
Honestly yeah, I like having my CDs in their cases on the shelf so if I want to listen to a specific CD I can take it out and play it in a CD player. Sure I have so much music at my fingertips thanks to streaming, but there’s something really personal about taking a disk to listen to it. I guess I understand now what people used to say about vinyls back in the day
No, the most convenient way is ripping them and turning them into media files that I can copy to anything I want.
Archiving them like this also helps fight against bit rot. They aren't getting any younger (and by the CD/DVD's last days, they weren't exactly made out of the most high quality materials). I'm already experiencing this with floppies and retro computer stuff.
I had limited run CDs that spent their life temperature controlled and out of sunlight and they still had parts of the data layer “rot” away to the point they aren’t listenable at all anymore.
After I found those I started getting records on vinyl instead.
I have one that i last updated in 2012 still. I had a nexflix subcription with 3 movies mailed to me that I'd rip in DVDfab and burn to another DVD and mail back the same day i received the movies.
I do, because DVDs can't get pulled from streaming services or be region locked, and it's worked out cheaper to buy discs than subscribe to yet another service