Oh sweet, my old Empire Earth box!

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 817 points –
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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.

... Sata DVD-ROM drives are a thing

Hell I've still got one just in case

Oh word?

They are, but now some modern cases don't have bays so personally I'm still restricted to external if I want one.

Could always plug it in temporarily; do what you gotta do, then remove it again.

Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn't want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.

I'm sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don't have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.

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.

My pdu doesn't have molex connectors.

I've since been informed you can get them with SATA connectors.

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.

But they do have easy open side panels so just chuck the drive in there

I mean... I have a usb external 3.5" drive...

As well as DVD of course.

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.