Maximum PC

This year's Dream Machine article left me scratching my head. You spent over $14,000 building the best machine money can buy and neglected to include any optical media reader/writer. What happened, did you run out of money? Are there no Blu-Ray/DVD burners worthy of Dream Machine status? Installing Windows must have been quite the challenge...

We installed Windows from a removable drive - no need for an optical drive these days. Speaking personally, I only use my personal optical drive to burn CD-Rs to listen to in my car, but I'm the only person I know who does this. All my software is online. I can't even remember the last time I bought something on physical media.

I guess I can also fill for other questions you may have.

What about movies?
Chances are you don't watch movies on your desktop, you have a TV and some kind of media player for that. In my case, my PlayStation 3 handles this very well. Even then, you can watch a ton of things on NetFlix, Hulu, or some other streaming service.

What about games?
Between Steam, Direct2Drive, Impluse, Good Ol' Games, and Origin, you pretty much have enough games to last you 10 lifetimes.

What about certain applications?
It depends. On my configuration, the only thing that I absolutely need the optical drive for is the OS, only because I didn't put it on a thumb disk. Otherwise the rest of my applications I do have a CD for I either have backed up or have some ISO.

What about using Blu-Ray?
If it's for watching movies, then, again, you probably have some entertainment center to handle this. I guess if you want some privacy at your desk you could do that. If you want to burn movies to Blu-Ray then: 1. if it's personal use, then chances are your Blu-Ray player is smart enough to be able to receive content over the network from a media server (plus it's heavily compressed so it'd be like burning a 128Kbps MP3 as a Redbook CD) 2. If you're distributing them... it's easier if you use a DVD because DVDs are essentially universal.

If you're using it for data back up... External hard drives are much better in the long run. Blu-Ray's price per gigabyte is cheaper (at under 1GB/$1. 1TB externals still go for about $100), but it takes 40 disks to reach a terabyte. Not to mention you can't assume every computer has a Blu-Ray drive because it's still an option, not a standard on any give computer with an optical drive. So if you buy a new computer, you're going to have to include Blu-Ray, all the time. Whereas with an external, it uses already standard interfaces.

In my opinion, Blu-Ray has no real place in the PC world as a standard.

However...
In argument for OP, I do have a lot of installable media on disks that don't have crappy DRM. Like I want to trash my Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory disk because it has StarForce, and I bought a DRM free copy on Direct2Drive. I'm also finding myself strapped for space on my backup so creating ISO's may not be viable right now. Mostly because I keep my Steam games on there. Yes I could just redownload them, but when I'm a pack rat and I have over 800GB worth of software on Steam, I don't think I want sit around to redownload them.

If you really want though OP, you can just buy a portable DVD drive for $30.

Thanks for such an honest and detailed answer! Now it makes sense. Maybe I'm a little old school, but when I buy a game or other software, I like to have a physical, tangible copy of it.

I partially agree with the statement about not remembering the last time you bought a CD or DVD as most of the software I use is downloaded freeware: Open Office, Paint.Net, Notepad++ to name a few. Most of the games are on disc. However, I find I'm buying games more for my Xbox lately. There's something to be said for just popping in a new game and having it work the first time without finagling drivers or upgrading hardware...

While I'm on the topic of doing away with discs, I'd like to recommend a freeware program I have found useful for doing just that: Virtual Clone Drive. It runs in the background and allows you to mount an ISO file just like it were a physical disc. Once the ISO file is mounted, a new optical drive with its own letter appears in My Computer. This is awesome for a media center PC.

Here is the link to the download page:
http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

No optical media capability? Ouch.
I guess I'm definitely old school. I burn DVDs for the DVD player downstairs and to make archival copies. I burn DVD+RW for data backup, CD-Rs for my stereo system, and I still have CDs of software. I just like having a physical copy I can hold onto.

Most online content quality just isn't high enough to justify getting rid of my Blu-Ray burner. Not to mention that I have over 500 music CD's, & only about 300 of them currently archived. Then there's Blu-Ray movies, yes, I actually watch Blu-Ray movies on my PC, & when available, I take advantage of the Digital Copy offerings to put them on my iPad as well.

If I want to share vacation video / photos with family & friends, I burn them a DVD. Important files that I don't want to loose, I burn to Blu-Ray & store at my friends house, along with the copys I keep on external HDD at my house. There are plenty of uses for optical drives even now, but I guess it's more a personal preference thing these days. Still, no ODD on Dream Machine 2012, I wouldn't have gone that route, & I cannot see myself tossing the ODD the way I did the FDD.

What was even more of a laugh was they spend all that money and didn't add any type of sound card.They were using a workstation motherboard which isn't built to have top of the line sound .