Optical Drive really needed?

[geno]

You never plan on backing up family pictures to external media? You never plan on burning a music cd for your truck / car?

Just to comment on this, my car stereo takes USB input, as does my TV / PS3, so everything is moving away from optical media or at least incorporating flash media a bit more. Of course, you'd like to have reliable backups of important files, so I think optical media fits this better than anything else at the moment, but even though not everyone has USB capable TVs / stereos just yet, the market is definitely moving in that direction.

 

[Rifter]

Just to comment on this, my car stereo takes USB input, as does my TV / PS3, so everything is moving away from optical media or at least incorporating flash media a bit more. Of course, you'd like to have reliable backups of important files, so I think optical media fits this better than anything else at the moment, but even though not everyone has USB capable TVs / stereos just yet, the market is definitely moving in that direction.

Optical media is far from reliable for backups. Cheap media will start to flake apart after 5-7 years and even good media will be lucky to make it past 15 years. I had a windows 98 disc burned on kodak gold media that started to flake apart on me a few months ago.

Tape or HDD is the only viable long term storage media IMO.