[gentoo-user] Re: is purchasing a usb blu ray a good idea?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2015-06-26, gottlieb@×××.edu <gottlieb@×××.edu> wrote:
> My new (dell E7450) laptop will be a slimline with no internal optical
> drive.  So I want to purchase an external optical drive.  My first
> thought was to get a drive that is both
>    a blue ray READER and
>    a dvd writer

AFAIK, none of my current computers have (or ever have had) blue ray
drives.  I'm 100% sure that 3 of them don't, but it's possible my
laptop can read blue ray disks.

Even the DVD drives get used very rarely these days. I used to install
OSes from optical disks, and therefor I used to burn the occasional
Fedora/Ubuntu DVD or systemrescuecd CD. But, I use USB flash drives
for that these days[1]. The optical drives my computers _do_ have
don't seem to be very reliable.  Not that you'd expect much from
anything with a motor and lots of of moving parts for which you paid
$15.

The only reason I can think of for having a BR drive is so you can
watch BR movies that Netflix mails you[2].

[1] Despite all steps explained in the blog posts on how to build a
    bootable flash drive based on an ISO image, I've found that for
    everything except systemrescuecd, all I have ever had do is:

      dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=64k    

[2] I still get plain old DVDs -- it turns out that blue ray doesn't
    improve the characters, plot, writing, direction, cinematography,
    editting, or anything that else matters about movies.  A Michael
    Bay movie on blue ray is still a Michael Bay movie.  

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I feel partially
                                  at               hydrogenated!
                              gmail.com