No optical drives?

Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

Except setup would only allow drivers to be found on A: drive!

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

The only other way was to create a custom slipstream version of install
CD with drivers included. Not an option at the time...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

On 8/11/20 12:10 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Mark Lloyd" wrote

| The theater near me is closed, but there's one in a nearby city (owned
| by the same company) that is open. Limited seating, reservations
| required, and no new movies.
|

My favorite local "arthouse" theater has a new movie,
limited to 25 people. They also sell "curbside popcorn".
Then again, theater popcorn is wretched stuff, drenched
with orange-colored vegetable oil.

I really don't like that fake butter.

And it's not often that
something's in the theaters that I actually want to see.
Before coronavirus I might go out twice a year.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought was not a
church member." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And
Other Essays_]

Ant wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
micky wrote:
Is it my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

It's not your imagination. Optical drives are going away.

But if you buy a computer without an optical drive, and you need or want
an optical drive, just be sure the box has room to add one. Adding one
is inexpensive ($25 USD or so) and easy to do.

Failing that, you could buy an external optical drive, one that plugs
into a USB port. I have one of those that I used to use with my laptop,
but since I no longer use my laptop, I no longer use that.

How are the external optical drives compared to internal drives? Are
they fast, stable, etc.?

My USB3 external DVD burner seems to have no speed issues, works as fast
as an internal drive from what I can tell. I've also used a USB2
external DVD burner and it was the same.

--
John C.

On 11/08/2020 15.05, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 14.53, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.


it was also possible to email an ftp server to request a file, which i
always found amusing.

Sending an email with a 1 MB attachment
would have provoked a call from the sysadmin :-D

then you had an idiot for a sysadmin.

Not at all. My mail accounts had total limit of 10 megs, for many years.


Gmail has an attachment limit of 25 MB, many SMTP servers, like postfix
default to 10MB,

That's now. Back then gmail had not been invented. I'm unsure webmail
had appeared.

many other mail services and corporates limit to 1 MB.

Depends... I worked at a big place where it was the custom to send one
another .doc or excel files by email (internal E server). Review,
resend. The admins were mad, they had set up shared corporate storage
and insisted we used those, and mail links instead. Each employee had a
dedicated folder on a server to share files. The Exchange server could
hardly cope with the load, was slow as molasses, and had to be split on
two or three servers.

The main reason is email is originally a text-only service protocol and
is NOT really unsuitable for data transport. Binary data must be BASE64
encoded to meet this requirement often doubling the attachment size. Not
efficient in any way effectively halving your max size limits.

Right.





--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 12/08/2020 00.35, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

Except setup would only allow drivers to be found on A: drive!

There was a command on MsDOS that made a directory appear as a drive.
Whas it "subst"?


--
Cheers, Carlos.

Ant wrote:
Ralph Fox wrote:
On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:32:17 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

And you just need one, no matter how many computers you have.

Usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, I can conceive of a
husband traveling on a business trip with his laptop and the USB optical
drive and his wife staying home with a desktop computer and needing an
optical drive.


Buy a second (and slim) USB optical drive for only $30.

https://www.cnet.com/products/lg-gp60ns50-super-multi-dvdrw-r-dl-dvd-ram-drive-usb-2-0-external/
https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-Portable-External-GP60NS50/dp/B00C2AMKR2

Why only USB2? Go USB3.

I don't think a DVD drive can read/write faster than USB2 speeds.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 19.41, Mark Lloyd wrote:

[snip]

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies,
because it was expensive.

I first got internet access in 1995, when the phone company made it a
local call to places that had dial-up numbers.

Problem here was that we had to pay local calls per minute of use.

Same in the UK. The US had the advantage that many telcos gave free
local/national calls in those days. That's why we always saw kids on
American shows glued to the phone. We couldn't afford to do that.

I remember having to pay 1p/min for dialup in 1997/8, plus it blocked the
line.

Chris wrote:
Ant wrote:
Ralph Fox wrote:
On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:32:17 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
And you just need one, no matter how many computers you have.
Usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, I can conceive of a
husband traveling on a business trip with his laptop and the USB optical
drive and his wife staying home with a desktop computer and needing an
optical drive.

Buy a second (and slim) USB optical drive for only $30.
https://www.cnet.com/products/lg-gp60ns50-super-multi-dvdrw-r-dl-dvd-ram-drive-usb-2-0-external/
https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-Portable-External-GP60NS50/dp/B00C2AMKR2
Why only USB2? Go USB3.

I don't think a DVD drive can read/write faster than USB2 speeds.


There's a table here of BluRay speeds, but I'm not sure
there's media available at the fanciful speed entries
in the table.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray

8x 36MB/sec

You'd be lucky to find BluRay media for home, let alone
some of the race-car grade examples in the table. I tried
a quick BD-R check on Newegg and they have 6x.

When a drive has an imaginative top speed, it makes me
wonder what media they used for verification.

My drive might claim to burn at 22x on DVD, but the chances
of finding media like that are roughly zero.

Usually each Wiki article, has a table of speeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

24x 33.2MB/sec

That's why the speedometer on my car goes up
to 200km/hr, because with the right hill (sheer cliff face),
a windless day and a brake failure, I might
just make it.

The day the magic media shows up in my mailbox,
is the day "we go USB3" :-)

Paul

On 8/11/2020 3:09 PM, Ant wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/8/2020 10:23 PM, micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.


It's not your imagination. Optical drives are going away.

But if you buy a computer without an optical drive, and you need or want
an optical drive, just be sure the box has room to add one. Adding one
is inexpensive ($25 USD or so) and easy to do.

Failing that, you could buy an external optical drive, one that plugs
into a USB port. I have one of those that I used to use with my laptop,
but since I no longer use my laptop, I no longer use that.

How are the external optical drives compared to internal drives? Are
they fast, stable, etc.?


I have experience with only one (I just checked, but couldn't find a
brand or model number on it), and not recently, but it's been completely
stable. I'm not sure about its speed, since I haven't compared it to an
internal drive, but it's been adequate for my needs.


And its etc. has been fine G


--
Ken

Paul wrote:
Chris wrote:
Ant wrote:
Ralph Fox wrote:
On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:32:17 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:
And you just need one, no matter how many computers you have.
Usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, I can conceive of a
husband traveling on a business trip with his laptop and the USB optical
drive and his wife staying home with a desktop computer and needing an
optical drive.

Buy a second (and slim) USB optical drive for only $30.
https://www.cnet.com/products/lg-gp60ns50-super-multi-dvdrw-r-dl-dvd-ram-drive-usb-2-0-external/
https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-Portable-External-GP60NS50/dp/B00C2AMKR2
Why only USB2? Go USB3.

I don't think a DVD drive can read/write faster than USB2 speeds.


There's a table here of BluRay speeds, but I'm not sure
there's media available at the fanciful speed entries
in the table.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray

8x 36MB/sec

You'd be lucky to find BluRay media for home, let alone
some of the race-car grade examples in the table. I tried
a quick BD-R check on Newegg and they have 6x.

When a drive has an imaginative top speed, it makes me
wonder what media they used for verification.

My drive might claim to burn at 22x on DVD, but the chances
of finding media like that are roughly zero.

Usually each Wiki article, has a table of speeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

24x 33.2MB/sec

Those speeds were always peak speed when reading from the outer edge of the
disc.

I would never write at anything faster than 8x to reduce the chances of
failed writes. Someone pointed an electron microscope at DVDs written at
different speeds and the distortions at the highest speeds were
frightening.

That's why the speedometer on my car goes up
to 200km/hr, because with the right hill (sheer cliff face),
a windless day and a brake failure, I might
just make it.

The day the magic media shows up in my mailbox,
is the day "we go USB3" :-)

Paul

On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:21:33 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 12/08/2020 00.35, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

Except setup would only allow drivers to be found on A: drive!

There was a command on MsDOS that made a directory appear as a drive.
Whas it "subst"?

Yes, and it's still available in Win 10. It never went away.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:21:33 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
wrote:

On 12/08/2020 00.35, Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Andy Burns wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Damn Windows Server 2003 required a floppy to install PERC 5/i
controller drivers on PowerEdge servers...a FLOPPY...2003...USB would
not work.

If push came to shove, without a floppy drive you could have burnt a
custom CD/DVD with \i386\$oem$\$1\drivers

Except setup would only allow drivers to be found on A: drive!

There was a command on MsDOS that made a directory appear as a drive.
Whas it "subst"?

Yes, and it's still available in Win 10. It never went away.


Yeah but can you run this command from withing setup?

BTW this was finally straw for me and RAID. Also diag system at the time
with a live session of Linux...no need for stinkin' driver there...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Ant wrote:

How are the external optical drives compared to internal drives? Are
they fast, stable, etc.?

The etc would be the "tray style".

The laptop type, is a compression hub. The tray has a tiny
spring, and when it releases, you hear a "pop" and it
comes out all of 1/2 an inch.

The desktop 5.25" type has a tray that
you just lay the disc into a depression.
And there are two depressions, with a separate
one for mini-CDs (mini-CDs are used for drivers).
The tray is motorized and comes all the way out
via motor. No fumbling required.

There is also a slim that works like a toaster,
where the hub/gripping method is unknown. Such a
slim might be on the side of a very-large-screen
AIO machine. Since the screen is tipped on a slight
angle, the toaster in that case has to engage the
hub somehow, while the disc is leaning to the side
a little bit.

Whereas a slim on a USB tether, it's likely to lay
flat on the table, so at least there won't be
weird angles involved, or scratched media.

Paul

On 12/08/2020 15.47, Chris wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 19.41, Mark Lloyd wrote:

[snip]

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies,
because it was expensive.

I first got internet access in 1995, when the phone company made it a
local call to places that had dial-up numbers.

Problem here was that we had to pay local calls per minute of use.

Same in the UK. The US had the advantage that many telcos gave free
local/national calls in those days. That's why we always saw kids on
American shows glued to the phone. We couldn't afford to do that.

Indeed. My parents would get mad at me if I used the phone for a few
minutes.

I remember having to pay 1p/min for dialup in 1997/8, plus it blocked the
line.

I lived in a shared flat for some years, and I had to record the
timestamps of all my connections and pay for them to the common phone
"jar". Both Fidonet calls and Internet calls :-)

There was software for Fidonet which would take the call list and take
into account local, provincial, or national calls and calculate the cost
of all of them correctly - but then the telco would have their own
version of the cost.

--
Cheers, Carlos.