lostinlodos wrote:
It's all about the total amount of each type of material. Most cd/dvd boards have more gold platinum and palladium. More copper. More nickel. Just laws of averages.
^^ This
Think of your standard motherboard... how many times do you see large capacitors, or copper coils, or large plastic sockets, even empty board space... All that cuts into the 'valuable metals/total weight ratios'. Most CD/DVD boards are miniaturized with little extraneous elements... even more so for hard drive logic boards. As the components shrink, they have to be higher performance which usually translates to more valuable metals as well :)