Incoming advices of external CD-ROM drives in 3, 2, 1…
You can just buy an internal DVD-ROM drive and install it in your pc. If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard you can use PCIe expansion cards. Power can be supplied by Molex.
Bruh I’m comfortable building my own PCs and that still sounds way more effort than just buying an external optical drive with USB interface.
If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard
Bro, IDE has been dead for YEARS now, I’d be shocked if there was an IDE connector on any consumer computer made in the last 10 years (Industrial stuff can get weird)
I figured disk drives were kinda obsolete so they’d use obsolete connectors.
In any event, my example was to explicitly not suggest an external disk drive on USB.
yea, but that’s pretty janky. external if you’ve got a small desktop or laptop - go internal if you can (still rocking my cd drive in my desktop)
Most gaming pc cases now don’t have any bay slots on the front panel. USB power buttons and audio plugs got moved to the top and all the slots for floppy and CD drives just vanished.
I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.
I’ve always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.
It was late at night and I couldn’t wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.
I work in IT and people question my sanity when I’m walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.
I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.
You couldn’t play it anyway. It has SecuROM as a copy protection and that is basically a rootkit that is not allowed to run on Windows Vista and above.
Run it in a VM, then get the NoCD from gamecopyworld?
(Not sure if that’s an option for securom)
Then you get a drive, but the game you loved is no longer playable since the server it is using to confirm its license has been offline for years.
Yeah, but then it’s easier to download the whole game rather than buying a CD/DVD drive.
I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.
I just bought an external cd/dvd drive so I can convert my DVD library into a digital one for convenience and to preserve the dvds longer.
I’m having some issues with the speed of conversion, but my biggest problem is quickly becoming storage space.
Also, I dug up some of my old games like Caesar III and installed a no-CD “patch”.
Good times.
There’s an adapter or replacement for everything
Drives are cheap
