Hard drives have been around since the 1950s and were first created (opens in a new tab) after IBM discovered the ‘Random Access File’ applications. From there, we’ve seen each generation of hard drives get smaller and less bulky, eventually fitting easily into offices and homes. This coincided with the decrease in the size of the disc carriers, which was originally 24 inches but was reduced to the standard 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch size.
The 1990s saw the first DVD-ROM compatible computers, a year after the invention of the DVD format. And in 2003, Toshiba released the first laptop with a built-in DVD-ROM drive, called the Toshiba Portege M100 (opens in a new tab). Funny enough, you can still find this model available for purchase on Ebay, although it’s used and probably in not particularly good condition.
Naturally, other laptop manufacturers have followed suit. This included Dell’s own set of laptop models, including the Dell Inspiron 1525, which was my mid-range machine of choice when I was in college in the mid-2000s. And for years that was the norm for laptops, something that went unchallenged. If you had a laptop, there was an optical drive in it.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. The internal drive was eventually phased out of laptops altogether, to the detriment of the entire industry.
The Golden Age of Hard Drives and Laptops
In the early and mid-2000s, a laptop with an internal disk drive was a standard feature, which was not to be questioned. My own Dell Inspiron 1525, which was a clunky, chunky sonnabitch of a laptop, had its own disk drive. It made sense of its weight and size as I was basically carrying a DVD player.
Not only could I watch movies and TV shows, or listen to music whenever I wanted, but I could also buy, keep indefinitely, or even share computer programs with other people. Not to mention the ability to burn CDs on the fly, although this was a dying practice with the advent of simply saving MP3s to flash drives or MP3 players being far more reliable methods.
But having a built-in disc drive offered tons of options besides using purely digital means, and it was an option that many laptop owners appreciated.
Why Laptop Manufacturers Stopped Including Disk Drives
We could find many reasons why laptops with internal disk drives have gone from standard functionality to rare unicorn. Hard drives generally saw a decline starting around 2009 after major manufacturer Fujitsu exited the market, and in 2011 when a series of floods in Thailand (opens in a new tab) impacted many hard drive factories, with forecast shortages causing prices to double.
Most important is the advent of cheap, reliable, fast and large capacity USB drives, cloud storage and video streaming options that have taken over from hard drives. On paper, this makes sense, since DVDs and CDs weren’t the most reliable hard media and could easily scratch, affecting playback.
There is also a commonly held fact that not including hard drives has made the best laptops and the best gaming laptops cheaper to make and buy, allowed laptop circuit boards to be larger and less dense, required fewer layers, and reduced weight and thickness.
There is some truth in the cheaper aspect, as settlement of the lawsuit in 2017 (opens in a new tab) accused optical drive makers of “colluding to inflate the prices of optical drives sold to major computer companies and retailers”. And over time, laptops have generally become thinner and lighter.
The Real Reasons Why Internal Hard Drives Were Removed
However, the main reason companies have jumped at the chance to remove optical drives and hard drives from laptops is simple: it allows for better control.
In the days when computer programs and media were exclusively on physical media, once you made that purchase, you had complete control over how you used it. Corny public service announcements like “Don’t Copy That Floppy” and the like were trying to scare kids into not copying or sharing this media, which had absolutely no effect.
But look what happened once digital media became the norm: the tech industry quickly leapt up and replaced the actual physical programs you could own, copy and transmit with subscriptions that took away ownership of the user and forced us to constantly pay companies for the right to rent programs like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite. This coincided with the phasing out of optical/hard disk drives not only for laptops, but also for some pc now (opens in a new tab). If you have no way to use physical methods, you are forced to use numerical methods.
And while disk drives can increase the size of laptops in general, which would be a killer for some of the super lightweight models, that doesn’t hold water when looking at some of those desktop replacement laptops that weigh as much or more than my old Dell Inspiron 1525. Honestly, if one of the selling points of a replacement computer was that it included an internal hard drive, I’d buy it instantly and happily lug it around.
The price argument is also irrelevant. While technological advancements over the years have increased dramatically, the cost of developing and distributing PCs has not skyrocketed thanks to Moore’s Law (opens in a new tab). After COVID increased the demand for laptops due to remote working being much more common, we actually saw those prices inflate for the same technology.
Final Thoughts
In no way am I advocating that the PC market revert to every laptop having an internal hard drive, be it DVDs, CDs or even Blu-rays. But the way manufacturers were able to eliminate such an important solution altogether while stabilizing rising PC prices is unacceptable.
There should be several options for the average buyer. For example, I believe it is important to have the best thin and light laptops available for those who cannot carry a substantial amount of weight on his back or shoulder. However, there should be options for larger laptops to have a built-in internal drive.
And that’s really what I’m advocating, that those options be given back to the buyer. Not just for the convenience of having a DVD, CD or BR player inside a machine that you interact with for many hours a day, but because we’ve already seen what happens when businesses can have full control over your media instead of you. And it’s full of exploitation, plain and simple.