A USB DVD Reader/Writer costs 15 bucks. (I’m too used feel like that meme, and then at some point I needed to find a way to get a Mini-PC to read CDs, and as it turns out it’s quite simple - I reckon it was more a case of “can’t be arsed to do it” than a case of “can’t do it”).
I wonder how long that price will last. We might be living in just the right time to buy a boatload of optical drives.
Well, I got the ones I needed (I got 2, one for me and one for the person I was configuring a Mini-PC for) from China with Aliexpress, and in my experience you can usually find adapters for old tech directly from China even when stores in the West don’t have those.
In fact I was curious when I was writting this comment and I checked and it turns out they also have Floopy Disk USB adapters and, funnilly enough, they costs the same as the USB DVD Reader/Writters (which makes some sense as eventually the whole functionality is integrated and the cost is mainly the mechanical parts and assembly, plus those things are probably small manufacturing runs).
Most electronics factories over there aren’t exactly designing top of the range modern consumer electronics, but they’re perfectly capable of designing even complex electronics products (in my experience, they have more trouble with software than hardware) - hence for example there are several Single Board Computer designers over there - and they’re so many that they’re constantly coming out with quirky products while competing with each other (and not all of which is stuff with lots of LED lights and which play some crappy jingles), so I guess it makes sense somebody over there would’ve created adapters for old storage media (in fact I was curious again, so I looked for and indeed found a “Vinyl player with USB recording”).
As long as Electronics in China keeps having the sort of competitive environment and lots of little factories like it was in the West before the 80s, I reckon somebody over there will keep on coming up with adaptors for old storage tech.
I technically have a DVD drive/burner still. It’s just not in the computer because the case didn’t have any drive bays for it and I couldn’t find one I could afford that had even one when I built this machine. I could just run it outside the case but… Nah.
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there’s no physical eject button. It Just Works!
I keep the C&C Tiberian sun and the original Far Cry box for nostalgia.
If you out the CD in the microwave for 15 seconds you can shrink it down to the size of a SD card, the SD card slot will read it.
You know that this answer will be mashed into an “AI” training set somewhere.
I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can’t wait for AI to bring that shit back.
