Optical drive demand surges amid Windows 10 retirement | Hacker News Reader

Optical drive demand surges amid Windows 10 retirement

tomshardware.com

16 pointscroes11 comments

This took me too long to find in the article:

>People building new systems solely for the reason of getting on board with Windows 11 are now in the market for disc drives, which is likely the main driver behind this sudden trend.

So Windows 11 is demanding new hardware, and consumers are choosing to also include a disc drive.

It’s becoming a trend to buy a Blu-ray drive and buy movies on eBay.

You can get collections for a buck a movie, and most top movies can be bought for 6 dollars. People are waking up to the ripoff cycle of “ owning” digital media where things disappear from your collection with no warning.

Piracy and physical media are once again on the rise now that streaming became cable.

I don't actually see an explanation for why people moving from Windows 10 to 11 need to purchase new optical drives. Why couldn't they use either the same PC as before or, if using a new computer, use the same optical drive as before? Am I missing something obvious?

Agreed, from the article, there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation. Just two largely unrelated trends.

Hasn't the ISO to install W11 now gotten too large to be burned to the biggest DVD?

Could be a small number of experienced users, a few thousand in every city, who have always installed Windows from optical disk.

Reliably and simply using the ISO as intended for it's primary purpose of being burned to optical disk.

Moving from CDROM to DVD to large DVD would have been the rarely-triggered optical-drive upgrading cycle driven by Windows bloat alone.

Looks like Blu-rays would be the only thing big enough now.

I would think most would reach for a solid state USB drive, no? Far cheaper and infinitely reusable.

> Hasn't the ISO to install W11 now gotten too large to be burned to the biggest DVD?

No.

The Windows 11 media creation tool still officially supports creating a DVD installer from ISO image for Windows 11 (including the latest 25H2 release), alongside USB drives etc. The requirements for the DVD version are still the same 8gb of space it has been for a while. As of today, the ISO is 7.2GB.

Virtually everyone uses a bootable USB thumbdrive or similar today though, and page you download the ISO from heavily encourages this, and is trivial to make with the Installation Media tool Microsoft give you.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11

You are right.

That wouldn't require a Blu-ray.

The ISO expands quite a bit after it is installed to your SSD.

Maybe they are backing up their whole systems to the Blu-rays?

Or have big movie collections which some comments indicated was expected.

I've used USB for a while, don't think I've even used a DVD to install Windows.

Did use them to back up years ago, but now a HDD for that.

> Why couldn't they use either the same PC as before

Windows 11 requires that the machine have a TPM.

But the drives can be reused, either moved to a new desktop if internal, or just plugged into the new computer if external. Unless older drives themselves don't work with Windows 11?

Why isn't Mac or Linux popular in Japan?

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