You might’ve heard about a new YouTube channel called Smokin’ Silicon, where they make computer-based videos mostly in the modern era. I have recently found a video that is unusual in a way because they have found a computer tower case that can accept a Blu-ray or DVD drive. Of course, optical drives are a rarity in 2024, so you thought it would be too old-school for a modern PC like the one they are building in the video.
What I wanted in my Custom Built High Performance Windows 10 PC is those flashy RGB lights that make it look cooler than the boring ones with the optical drives installed, and that’s why I picked one from Deepcool that seemed to look cool, but they had gone away with the optical drive bay. It seems a shame that many PC’s nowadays don’t come with that sort of thing, but in 2020 I bought two LG Blu-ray drives attached to an OWC Mercury Pro enclosure with USB 3.0, and that was a great alternative to getting a computer with an optical drive bay. (Well, the only exception is a 2007 PC that I got at at thrift store, and it is the HP Pavilion a6010n, and that came with a LightScribe DVD drive.) The LG Blu-ray drives with their OWC enclosures are currently attached to my Sonoma iMac Pro from 2017, and my Custom Built Windows 10 PC. One of them was previously attached to my original 4K Ventura iMac from 2017, but I think Sonoma did not kill the optical disk drivers fortunately, so that I can burn my CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-ray’s without any problem with Roxio Toast and the open-source Burn software for Mac. (And I can even play my Blu-ray movies too, courtesy of MacGO Blu-ray player and Leawo Blu-ray player.)
It’s also a bit of a shame that Laptops nowadays don’t come with an optical drive anymore, such as my Retina MacBook Pro from 2013, and my HP Pavilion 15 Gaming Laptop, where I have several portable external USB DVD and Blu-ray drives hiding in my office closet drawers, the most interesting are the Kingbox USB-C DVD drives, and the Verbatim USB 3.0 Blu-ray drives. My Acer Aspire 5552 is on the fritz when reading my burned CD-R’s though…
2024 is such a sad time for CD-ROM software. In the age of digital downloads such as Steam and GOG, the CD-ROM medium is waning. Whenever I go to a retail store nowadays, all I get is not a lot of interesting PC software and games in their displays. The only place I can find them is at thrift stores, and I actually found the Mac OS X version of the Living Books title from Dr. Seuss: The Cat in the Hat, ported by Software MacKiev in the late 2000s.
I also found Disney’s Active Play, A Bug’s Life from the thrift store as well. Not a lot of CD-ROMs being stocked in 2024. That’s why I didn’t do much thrift store acquisition logs in the past couple of years!
So I wanted to ask a question once more: Why would anyone make a modern gaming PC with a DVD or Blu-ray drive? By the time DVD and Blu-ray drives are no longer being manufactured, there’s not much of choice from a reputable manufacturer such as LG, and they have been making high quality DVD and Blu-ray drives since the 1990s!
So it’s interesting that some people like Smokin’ Silicon are making gaming PC’s with internal DVD and Blu-ray drives. To me, I really enjoy CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-ray’s on computers, and I hope it will last longer on a high note for future generations to come! When we got our new HiSense 4K TV’s, we also needed the Sony UBP-X800M2 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray players, and we think that CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-ray’s are going to have one last chance in our home theatres and TV setups, and it is going to be the last model that Sony is manufacturing and releasing before the streaming boom and 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray players being discontinued in the next few years.
But anyways, if you like this blog post, stay tuned for more, and hopefully I will keep on being active in 2024 depending on my schedule, but for now, take care!
P.S. I had my Valentine’s Day and Family Day celebrations this February! Amazing, isn’t it?
Katie Cadet's Computer and Video Game Collection 
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