I have already gone from nine machines to seven. The next net shift involves me giving up two machines and the wife giving up one. Behold the power of virtual machines...
With the advent of the purchase of two Gateway LX series cases (the ones with the awesome dual SATA backplane and removable 3 1/2" caddies). I am considering not having optical drives installed.
Both of the boards I will be building on will boot from my USB optical drive. And with 100% of the software I use being accessible via the network after the OS install. The OS install seems like the only reason I would want an optical drive. I will never burn disks or read disks from those machines, why draw wattage for what amounts to vestigial components? I suppose I could set up network booting, but using an install disk once seems so much easier.
So, I guess I am arguing that in our case a single optical USB drive and the optical drives on our laptops should be sufficient for our needs.
