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.
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)
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.
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.
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I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.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)
USB Blu-ray is how I got my media library… totally…
No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.
I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.
ISO gang here. Give me pure, unadulterated bit streams with menu-y goodness. I got the space available
Despite only having a few disc drive dependent games, this and the amount of USB ports is why I got the budget desktop I got around a couple years ago. Having a disk drive has been great, especially when I got a few CDs and don’t feel like using the old Sony Discman I got because it sometimes just stops after certain songs.
With powered hubs and balanced tree topology, you can split a single root controller into 45 endpoints. Your motherboard being able to support that many devices and the shared bandwidth might be a problem, but it’s theoretically possible to survive off of a single USB port.
There’s some slight benefit to having games that are just a sticker with a license number in the box. Probably, the only one benefit though.
