Will The Optical Disc Die Already!

Optical discs have been available to the general public since the 1980’s in the form of music CDs and have evolved into Blue-Ray video discs today.  As much as some things have changed, many have stayed the same.  Optical discs stink.  They scratch too easily, proper storage of the discs takes up too much space, and the capacity is too small.  

I remember playing CDs in my car, something I haven’t done in the last 5 years.  I’m cruising down the street and hit a bump.  Woops, my song just skipped and my CD is now scratched.  Oh well, the music industry will be happy to sell me another.  Anybody that has young children probably has experienced what they can do to DVDs.  The DVD player won’t read your child’s favorite disc anymore.  You take it out of the player and look at the bottom of it.  I’m not sure what the substance is on the disc, but it is nearly impossible to remove.

Look around your house at all of those CDs, DVDs, Blue-Ray, Game Console, and backup discs.  It may look like you have a small library in your house.  You can trade in that wall of DVDs for a 2TB hard drive that is the size of a paperback book and can hold almost 1000 DVD quality movies.  You can probably store all of your music in MP3 or AAC format on your computer’s hard drive.  My 32GB iPod Touch can hold close to 700 CDs worth of music and it won’t skip in my car.  Plus, it is very convenient not to have to swap discs or browse through all of that physical media.

Accessing your backup data is equally frustrating.  Which disc are the wedding photos on?  Where is that document?  Backup discs are a pain to search through and recovering data is a slow process.  External hard drives are very cheap, $139 for 2TB, and can provide instant access to your data.  A word of caution, if you keep your back up hard drive next to your computer, you will lose all of your data in the event of a burglary or fire.  It is a good idea to have a 2nd drive for off site storage (more on this topic in a future article).

I’m not saying that optical media didn’t have its place in computing history.  Before hard drive capacity soared, they offered a lot of storage.  That time has come and gone so lets stop filling the landfills with the shiny discs.  Speaking of that, I wonder how many millions of AOL discs are in landfills?