[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Paul Sture]

In article <k5i49b$mmf$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> On 2012-10-15 22:38:21 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt said:
> 
> > Well, the Mac Mini server replaces the internal CD/DVD drive with a 
> > second disk drive...
> 
> There's no internal optical drive on any of the current Mac Mini variants.
> 
> The unibody series removed that device.
> 
> Apple has also removed optical drives with the MacBook Air and MacBook 
> Pro Retina boxes.
> 
> I'd expect optical drives to disappear from other Mac models over time.

Many folks won't miss optical drives much either.

Optical usage here has dropped over the last two/three years to having 
the ability to read existing data on that medium and creating boot and 
recovery discs for *nix and Windows systems on non-Apple hardware.

Not quite ready to abandon the medium completely on non-Apple hardware, 
since using USB sticks to boot current hardware here too often involves 
a detour through BIOS setup, which isn't required when booting from 
CD/DVD.

Any non-bootable optical disc image delivered gets mounted locally by 
the host OS nowadays. For example:

VMS: Use LDDRIVER
OS X:  hdiutil mount image-name
Linux: mount -o loop imagename /mnt/imagename
Windows: Although free third party utilities (e.g. Virtual CloneDrive) 
are available to present CD/DVD images as mounted devices, I tend to 
access these images by adding them to a VirtualBox client.

-- 
Paul Sture