[ale] A modest proposal for the times

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

Ahhhh, when you said "optical drive" I completely missed the issue of
CD/DVD.   Yes, you can get an external Blue Ray DVD/CD "everything" for
about 50 dollars.

Most people either download things you would put on a DVD/CD from the
Internet or put it on a USB Thumb Drive.   You can get 1 TB thumb drives
pretty cheap these days....much more convenient than carrying around a
CD/DVD drive.

md

On Mon, Apr 7, 2025 at 10:02 PM Jon "maddog" Hall <jon.maddog.hall at gmail.com>
wrote:

> >Apparently the home user desktop is dead... And when did they >drop
> optical drives?
>
> The last time I checked there are an estimated 2.5 billion laptop and
> desktop "PC"s installed, with 250 million laptop and desktop PCs shipped in
> 2023.   This is a slight drop from 2022, but as Mark Twain once said "The
> reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
>
> As to the "optical drives" they have not been used for a long time.  You
> may be thinking of SATA Solid State Digital (SSD) drives where for a long
> time the 2.5" either HDD or SSD were standard in laptops.   You may have
> noticed that laptops are getting thinner and thinner.   They have dropped a
> lot of large connectors like VGA, RJ45 Ethernet controllers, etc for USB -
> C and HDMI.
>
> Likewise they have dumped the slower SATA controllers (600 MBytes per
> second) for M.2 NVMe solid state memories that typically attach to the
> motherboard's PCIe bus and have speeds of 7,000 MBytes per second or even
> faster if attached to PCIe 5.0 and doing the equivalent of RAID with them.
> I have had reports of 20000 MBytes per second reading.  They are very thin
> and I have seen sizes up to 4TB and very price competitive with an external
> HDD of the same capacity.
>
> md
>
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2025 at 8:47 PM William Bagwell via Ale <ale at ale.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, April 07, 2025 01:25:55 PM jon.maddog.hall--- via Ale wrote:
>> > I bought a fairly high-end Lenovo (not that model).   The main time the
>> > fans come on is when I am updating the kernel.   Otherwise it is
>> > completely silent.
>> >
>> > Unfortunately with the new tariffs that 2K laptop will probably be over
>> 3K.
>>
>> Same with the wife's budget PowerSpec, very quite and never notice it.
>> Not a
>> gamer, but it was so much better and cheaper than anything aimed at
>> office
>> users. Apparently the home user desktop is dead... And when did they drop
>> optical drives?
>>
>> BTW your long post below was an interesting read!
>> --
>> William
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>
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