I was buying my new pc parts when I realised I needed a optical drive. What my question is to everyone is are they really needed? Do I need to buy a new Optical drive or can i use my old OD better yet use a usb to install windows. i dont find many good reasons to buy an OD. What does everyone else think about this topic?
You could leave it out for now. As you said, install Windows from a USB stick (make sure you've got one large enough), maybe buy an optical drive a bit later on.
I like to have one just in case I want to play some old games, or perhaps play the odd CD.
They're not really neccessary these days, but there are times when you need to read something off a disk and you think "I wish I had that damn optical drive installed".
I hardly find much need for an optical drive nowadays unless I want to burn a CD to listen to in my car, because my car isn't new enough to have an auxillary jack. I've installed Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well as Ubuntu off of USB drives, it is really pretty easy to do nowadays.
Optical drives just waste a SATA port, in my opinion. They should intoduce an LP drive, I have a load of records lying unlistened to. There's no real way to find high quality audio files. (mp3 has al low bitrate, and is compressed audio) other than pirating. I'm not advocating piracy but, there is a distibution problem
You know how they get FLACs? They rip them from the CDs.
Lp's are higher quality than flac though. Flac is nice, but not high enough quality. There are few options for downloading flacs as well
That's entirely dependant on the individual situation; digital audio can't reproduce LP quality, no matter what, due to a lack of range and clarity in the repreoduction, even with a world-class setup. You could rip a terrible LP, and get crap, or rip a fantastic LP, and get gold; audibly, though, FLAC is more than high-enough quality.
I suppose most can't tell the difference, flac is enough for most, and the quality varies between Lps but generally they are better.
I can tell the difference though becuase i'm a bit of an audio whore.
There's no real reason to have an optical drive. You can install Windows or another operating system with a USB stick, you can download most games through services like Steam now, and you can get digital copies of movies that usually come with blu-ray discs anyway. Not to mention that no one burns discs anymore.
I have a blu-ray drive in my computer, but I barely ever use it.
I stopped using them around 5 years ago.