[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]Between the lens getting so dirty/scratched it can't read disks and the motors failing on laptop drives, for both the head and the rotator, it is a common enough issue for a commonly not used component that it makes more sense to use an external drive when it is needed, and easily, cheaply replaced when they fail, rather than an internal component on a mac (which are notoriously difficult to fix anyways). And my hate for optical media is directed more at the media itself rather than the noisy slow drives (issues I can live with if it worked). Even the act of inserting a CD can cause the spindle area of the disk to crack. Even tiny hairline, imperceptible scratched can cause the media to fail, and rewritable media is so unstable that even a disk burned and verified 10 minutes earlier can degrade to the point of producing cyclic redundancy errors... People should be discouraged from using such a poor medium. If you need it, you can USB it.[/citation]
As of a year ago, I'm anticipating CD/DVDs to be replaced by SD cards. Smaller, holds more data and has the potential to be as fast as SSDs with USB 3 technology. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for this change.