I’ve been drooling over the specifications of my next computer for well over a month now, tweaking bits here and there to ensure that the PC I end up building will provide the best value for money I can get. Sure there are a few extravagances in it like the Corsair H70 water cooling kit and the Razer Megasoma mouse pad but otherwise it’s a very respectable rig that will serve me well over the course of the next few years. The initial design I had in my head however failed to account for a few of the real world issues that actually building this system would entail, forcing me to make some tough decisions.
Firstly the case I currently use, a Lian Li PC-B20B, has a drive cage that only fits 4 hard drives in it. Sure I’d probably be able to stuff one in the floppy bay but its far from an ideal solution and it just so happens that the perfect place for the water cooling kit would be right smack bang where the hard drive bay currently is. I’m not sure how I stumbled across it but I saw this awesome product from Lian Li the EX-34NB which converts 3 of the front drive bays into 4 internal hard drive bays, complete with a fan. It was the perfect solution to my dilemma allowing me to have the 4 storage drives and the water cooling solution living together in my case in perfect harmony.
Of course then I asked myself the question, where would the SSD go?
The obvious choice would be in the floppy slot since I have 2 of them and neither of them are getting used, but I may have to remove the cage to fit the water cooler in there (it looks to be a tight fit from the measurements). Additionally the motherboard I’m looking at going with, the AsRock P67 Extreme6, comes with a nifty front bay adapter for a couple USB3 ports that doubles as a SSD mounting kit. This means though that I’d have to be giving up one of the longest lived components that I’ve kept for the better part of a decade, my dual layer DVD burner.
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I bought it but I do know I shelled out a good $200+ dollars for my little IDE burner, top of the line for its time. I can tell you one of the primary reasons I bought it however, it came with a black bezel that matched my gigantic black case perfectly. It was the perfect little work horse and whilst its dual layer abilities were only used a couple times when I forayed into the dark world of Xbox360 “backups” it still burnt many a DVD for me without complaint. It had also developed a curious little quirk over the years, opening with such force that it thought someone had pushed it back in after it had opened, causing it to promptly close. Still it functioned well for what I needed and it stayed with me through 2 full computer upgrades.
Thinking back over the past year or so I can only think of a few times that I ever really needed to burn a DVD for something, most of the time being able to cope quite well with my trusty little flash drive or network shares. Indeed many of the games that I bought either had a digital distribution option or were copied to my hard drive before attempting to install them. Whilst I’d be sad to see the one component that’s been constant in my computing life for such a long time to go I really can’t see a need for it anymore, especially when its taking up a potential mounting spot for my future SSD.
That’s not to say I think that optical media and their respective hardware are dead though, far from it. Whilst the cost of flash drives has come down significantly over the past decade they’re still an order of magnitude more expensive to produce than an optical disc. Indeed even in the lucrative server markets nearly all vendors still provide their updates and tools on CDs simply because the cost of doing so on a flash drive is just too high. Sure if you included the cost of the drive in that whole equation that might change matters slightly but like the floppy drive before it we’ve still got a good decade or so before optical media will be phased out of normal use, although it will still hang on for a long time to come.
It was an interesting realization for me to come to since optical media is the first format I witnessed being born, gain mainstream adoption and then begin to fade in obsolescence. Of course I’m still a long way from being rid of optical drives completely, my PC will be one of only 2 PCs in my house to not have an attached optical drive, but it is the signal that things are moving on and the replacement of flash media is ready to take the helm.
I’ll have to find a fitting home for my long time pal, probably in the media PC where he’ll get used every so often.
