cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14465880
It’s the endgame.
Laughs in GOG installers and good old physical media
Shakes hand in FOSS and reusing disconnected cables to create neighbourhood LAN.
go the Cuban way and share it all with usbs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
My PCs don’t even have optical drives.
Ok, my bad, one of them has one. I passed it to my SO who insists on using Windows (because architecture software that’s a bitch to run in anything else) and I had forgotten about that one. My bad. But I can’t game on that one, so my point stands.
Currently, my main machine (which has no optical media), has around 12 or 14TB of storage. That machine is currently offline because we’re rebuilding our home, so I’m living off my laptop and my SO has an actual PC (although it’s kind of old, [and running Windows, per her instructions], it’s still a fairly decent machine, with 16GB of RAM, something like 2 or 4 TB of storage (not sure now), a GTX1070 (yes it’s old, but it’s still a decent card if you’re not gaming).
However It’s the only machine with an optical drive, or with a plug and play drive interface (you can plug disks on the top of the case, it’s really convenient).
Aside from my old PCs that have optical drives, I also have an external USB one. I think I might have a USB floppy drive kicking around somewhere, too. It’s always good to be prepared.
You can get a mobile USB DVD R/W for 14 bucks from AliExpress and you can even get the blank DVDs for recording from there too (I checked as I was curious) and a spindle of 25 is (hilariously, IMHO) more expensive than the DVD R/W hardware.
I was putting together a replacement Mini PC for somebody with a really really old PC and just got two, one for myself, and it works fine.
That said, if you recorded CDs or DVDs back in the day the chance that they still work isn’t all that great (the data layer will age and degrades with light) but old pressed CDs/DVDs (which have an aluminium data layer) should be fine.
I wouldn’t at all recomend that as a means to store game installers (I’ve been using external HDs for a decade now, but I suspect SSDs easilly outlast HDDs in the long run since they don’t have moveable parts), but if you have some old games in a physical pressed CD or DVD they should work fine.
