Optical drive demand surges amid Windows 10 retirement — Japanese users switching to Windows 11 are buying up Blu-ray drives

Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 last week, which means an entirely new population has been forced to move to Windows 11, or be left behind. While the tech-savvy gentry can work their way around the artificially imposed red tape, most people would want to adhere to policy. That's what's happening in Japan. According to IT Media, shops in Tokyo's bustling Akihabara area are suddenly experiencing a meteoric rise in Windows 11 demand, alongside one other oddity — optical drives.

Yes, disc drives are apparently back in fashion in Japan as interest in switching to Windows 11 has "peaked" and only continues to increase there. People upgrading to the new operating system want to likely keep their physical media collection accessible, which has made disc drives a commodity. Unfortunately, they're out of stock pretty much anywhere, especially if you're looking for an internal Blu-ray drive (BD-R), which are a tier above the standard DVD-R options... but even those are scarce.

"Many people may prioritize writing speed and want an internal drive. With external drives, there's inevitably a limit to how fast they can be," says Dospara Akihabara Main Shop, a popular computer parts vendor in the region. Another retailer explained how internal disc drives are largely overlooked now since most modern PC cases don't have slots for proper optical drives. In pursuit of cleaner aesthetics and SSDs becoming mainstream, it doesn't make sense to account for the heat dissipation of an internal drive, especially with power-hungry GPUs.

There's little sense of urgency in upgrading from Windows 10 to 11, compared to how quickly people adopted Windows 10 when its predecessors became outdated. Still, the demand to carry over physical media support, especially in the age of perpetual licensing, seems to be more alive than ever. People building new systems solely for the reason of getting on board with Windows 11 are now in the market for disc drives, which is likely the main driver behind this sudden trend.

Another shop in Akihabara, TSUKUMO eX., highlighted how "There are quite a few people who want to install an optical drive in their machine in a Windows 11 environment, just like they did in Windows 10," corroborating that even if the West has generally moved on, Japan still loves its discs.

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