For some time now we have seen how laptops stopped coming standard with optical drives, i.e. DVD or Blu Ray drives. The natural thing is to think it’s because software distribution has made the leap to Internet distribution. However, a number of technical reasons led to this decision and ensured that DVD drives in laptops as part of the past. We explain to you what they are.
In the 90s, we often repeated a word, multimedia, and it all came from the fact that the appearance of the CD-ROM and its 650 MB of capacity had been an incredible leap compared to the floppy disks of just over 1 MB. As a result, the data to be processed ceased to have low precision due to lack of space. Quasi-robotic music became real music, we started to be able to manipulate photographs, etc. the DVD later. However, today new computers are no longer sold and we don’t see laptops with a DVD drive as standard.
What caused the end of DVD in laptops?
All optical discs are based on the same principles with which any disc player works, with the difference that the head is not a needle or any physical element, but a laser of greater or lesser precision. Which allows you to create discs with a greater number of irregularities on its surface, the smaller these are, the more information they can contain. However, this is a paradox because the more storage capacity an optical disc has, the longer it takes to access information.
The successor to DVD was Blu Ray and the jump was not made as a hard drive is required so random data access speed is not an issue. It is a medium that, at a sequential level and playing or recording a movie, is ideal. However, its capacity of several tens of GB is not necessary for media such as music and random access speed is disastrous for a computer system. Thus, software creators, taking advantage of the higher network speeds, have not hesitated to take the plunge to distribute and sell their programs on the Internet.
So, the DVD on laptops and desktops remained an atavistic piece, just like PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports for years. However, we have seen them disappear definitively in recent years, in a completely natural process. Their usefulness has diminished over time, anda there is no software distributed in this format and its inclusion in a laptop requires increasing its thickness. At a time when having an ultra-slim laptop in your catalog is of vital importance, it is normal that said part disappears.
What to do with my DVD player today?
Well, surely you haven’t used it for a long time, unless you use it to watch movies, although in that case we think you should already have them on a well-classified hard drive. Either way, we recommend replacing your DVD drive with a SATA SSD, which is more useful today and if you don’t know how to do that, just follow the link.