On 2015-06-26, gottl...@nyu.edu <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote:
> My new (dell E7450) laptop will be a slimline with no internal optical
> drive. So I want to purchase an external optical drive. My first
> thought was to get a drive that is both
> a blue ray READER and
> a dvd writer
AFAIK, none of my current computers have (or ever have had) blue ray
drives. I'm 100% sure that 3 of them don't, but it's possible my
laptop can read blue ray disks.
Even the DVD drives get used very rarely these days. I used to install
OSes from optical disks, and therefor I used to burn the occasional
Fedora/Ubuntu DVD or systemrescuecd CD. But, I use USB flash drives
for that these days[1]. The optical drives my computers _do_ have
don't seem to be very reliable. Not that you'd expect much from
anything with a motor and lots of of moving parts for which you paid
$15.
The only reason I can think of for having a BR drive is so you can
watch BR movies that Netflix mails you[2].
[1] Despite all steps explained in the blog posts on how to build a
bootable flash drive based on an ISO image, I've found that for
everything except systemrescuecd, all I have ever had do is:
dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=64k
[2] I still get plain old DVDs -- it turns out that blue ray doesn't
improve the characters, plot, writing, direction, cinematography,
editting, or anything that else matters about movies. A Michael
Bay movie on blue ray is still a Michael Bay movie.
--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! I feel partially
at hydrogenated!
gmail.com
