Crap Pro descender >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Us
Yup. At my second bike race this year, it was raining heavily. I was on 28 mm tires and disc brakes, the guy next to me had 22 mm tires, carbon wheels and rim brakes. I felt veeery comfortable during the race, whereas afterwards, most of the other racers complained that they didnāt feel 100 % safe. I wouldnāt even want to be in a race if I didnāt feel confident in my equipment.
IMHO the ease of maintenance is a bit of a myth stemming from a lack of experience.
Easier maintenance, really? Most of my on-road riding buddies are mostly concerned because of their lack of experience. Typically, I donāt need to touch my brakes for a year as hydraulic disc brakes are self adjusting (unlike mechanical rim brakes). Of course, I periodically check my brake pads for wear and replace them when necessary. And that is dead easy. I also clean my brake pads and rotors when I clean my bike.
Also, what do you mean by easy travel if I may ask? Are you concerned that you forget to put a shim in the calipers and then have to pry open your brake pads with tire levers?
Was with a friend who punctured on his disc brake road bike and the change was so easy. Maintenance can be done fairly easily too once you get the hang of it.
Iād be more concerned about travel with the integrated bars these days bit bike bags have come a long way too.
I think Iām talking myself into a Cervelo S5 disc
In my experience there is no net difference in maintenance, and most of the examples you give seem to exaggerate the frequency at which these occur. Disc brakes need stuff done to them less often, although these jobs could take slightly more time.
With rim brakes, you have to change brake cables periodically (which is equivalent to bleeding your hydraulic brakes), adjust calipers regularly as your pads wear (thatās done automatically with hydraulic brakes), check for wear and change pads (same-o-same-o).
Checking wear and cleaning the pads is slightly more involved as you have to take them out of the calipers. But I do that as part of every bike wash. But you save time not having to adjust brakes with wear. Since I need to wash my bike independently of brake type, thatās a draw. And replacement of brake pads seems to be the same type of effort either way.
My bikes need their brakes bled less than once per year. Thatās why brake bleeds are done as part of my yearly service at the bike shop. So here the extra effort for me is zero. If it were necessary to bleed them more often than once a year (which is not the case for me), Iād do it myself, it is not as if it is difficult. If Iād do the service myself, Iād change all my cables every year at least, too. And whether I change a brake cable or do a brake bleed, the effort doesnāt seem so different to me.
In my experience it is rare that rotors and calipers go out of alignment. (That was the case when my road bike was delivered and it took about 5 minutes to fix.) Even on my mountain bike, which still has wheels with quick release, the rotors havenāt gone out of true, unless I was moving between continents.
I have moved continents on four occasions in the last few years Japan ā> Canada ā> Germany ā> Japan, and always taken my bike with me. I donāt know why you feel the need to disconnect the brake lines when traveling, you can just leave your shifters, brakes and gear levers on the handlebars, and detach the handlebars. I pad them and tape them to the top tube or fork. For the disc rotors I put on the protectors that came with my bike and make sure the rotors point inwards. I havenāt had a problem. If I had rim brakes, I donāt think Iād pack any differently (save for the disc rotor protector, which wouldnāt be necessary). I surely wouldnāt disconnect all the cables either, thatās for sure.
Itās been mentioned in passing but rim brakes by their very nature destroy a major part of the wheel. I live in the north of England in a very hilly area - getting 2500m ascent and descent on an 80km ride is normal and 20% grades are not uncommon and thereās a lot of cr*p on the roads. Iāve replaced two wheelsets on my current road bike purely because the rims were totally shot and due to modern pricing systems it was as cheap to buy new wheels as it was to replace the rims and rebuild the existing hubs into those.
Another benefit of disc brakes is that if you break a spoke and your wheel goes out of true by more than a few mm then you donāt need to open up the brake so you can still ride and you still get the use of the brake.
Disadvantages : they pick up oil and dirt off the road and squeal like a hog!
I think a lot of complaints about discs are as much about resistance to change as the technology itself. I moved to discs on my mountain bike as soon as I could afford to. Now the only bike I have without discs is my road bike which is semi-retired and will probably just stay on the trainer for the rest of its days. My next road bike will have discs.
I have disc brakes on my fancy new summer bike.
I have gone back to my winter bike which has rim brakes in the past few weeks and DEAR GOD it feels scary. Like Iām braking with sponges.
Seriously considering buying another bike. Only problem is my winter bike also doubles up as a TT bike when I put a massive stem and clip on bars on it.
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A long time convert to disc, for years Iāve run my fixed gear commuter bikes with a disc brake up front. Riding in London in winter can easily destroy a rim in a few months.
The ability to run larger tyres and deep sections all year in all weather on all terrain, with consistent and modulated stopping power far outweighs the occasional squeal and a few extra grams for me.
For the most part, absolutelyā¦hence my comment ācompared to their peersā. And that is what matters - how they fare relative to their competitors.
I havenāt given up on rim brakes, but half of my bikes are modern retro. Mostly Iām worried about being able to get rims that I actually want to use. Everything else should be fine, if maybe a little more expensive than I want. I think if someone is buying a carbon racing bike, the rim brake is mostly dead. I was a long time disc holdout and then I got a gravel bike with discs. There are so many little advantages that I always feel a bit funny about building a new bike with rim brakes. You can still do it, but itās fighting a pointless battle.
I still feel a little resentment over the industry forcing this change on us, but maybe it was for our own good. On the other hand, I really wonder when I see a low-end bike that doesnāt have TA. The populace has demonstrated that they canāt be taught how to use a QR safely.
Ive still got V brakes on my Rock Lobster MTB, but at 63 im not buying another as it only gets out half a dozen times a year. Too many gears (27) and narrow bars to be seen in companyā¦
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something that I think would be cool, Is a rim and disk break bike that breaks with both at once! think about that kind of breaking power!, youād probably need hydrolic rim and disk breaks and levers that displace a lot of hydrolic fluid. it probably wont be the lightest or the most aero, but it would be the coolest
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Watch this video to see the death of some rims. Would be interesting to see disc brakes in a similar test.
After watching this, I might have a little anxiety about relying on rim brakes + carbon wheels for long mountain descents 
Ouch!!
I like rim breaks better because they are simpler to find the right wheels for, no thru axles. though you could run 650 on a disk bike, it just dosent make enough sense when finding a thru axle that fits your bike, if the were all standardized and the disk beak rotor mounting system were standardized so that you can just move any disk wheels that the frame has enough clearance for to any other frame and setup w/ disk with no compatibility issues. disk would also need to get to the same weight as rim and be just as aero. then I would make the switch
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When was the last time you rode the brakes for 5+ minutes while going 19+ mph the whole time. Interesting but not very applicable for day-to-day applications. Yes, YMMV.
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Yeah - itās a little (or more!) artificial. Although when I rode triple bypass this year, I smelled hot brake pads / rims from riders in front of me on a number of occasions (E.g. at the bottom of long bike-path descents where all the riders bunch up at a turn). I had never experienced that before.
My bikes all have disc brakes, so this whole rim brake thing isnāt something I have any direct experience with (other than when I was a kid decades ago!).
I have until this year been a big fan of rim brakes, but after having ridden nearly 1,500 km with a disc brake bike (and frequently switching between disc and rim brake bikes), I have a few thoughts that I wrote about on my blog (click here if you can read Norwegian) - summarized here:
Myths busted:
- Weight. Disc bikes often come with a weight penalty, but it may not necessarily be significant (e.g. S-Works Tarmac SL6 Disc weighs in at 6.8 kg with pedals and bottle cages in size 56).
- Rub. The rotors donāt rub as much as I feared, and is for all practical purposes not an issue.
- Looks. Esthetically speaking, disc brakes are less pleasing to the eye than rim brakes, but this is a subjective opinion, not a fact.
Arguments pro disc brakes:
- Effortless braking - especially useful in wet and cold conditions and on long decends. The braking power is significant and allows for harder braking at a later point, which has led me to descend faster.
- Better wheels in terms of braking - when the quality of the braking surface is less dependent on the manufacturer.
- Broader tyres - disc brakes allow for frames built with wider clearance.
Arguments against disc brakes that are valid:
- The pros will win races regardless of brake technology. 2 out of 5 wins in the Giro, Tour, Vueta, the 5 classics and the Worlds came on bikes equipped with discs, but if you look behind the numbers, youāll see that 16 out of the 25 wins with disc brakes were on a Specialized. The guys riding these bikes would probably have won regardless of bike or braking technology.
- Fat, lumpy hoods. The hoods on the mechanical Shimano Dura Ace are significantly bigger than those on the Di2 version. This is a personal preference, but I dislike lumpy hoods.
Arguments against disc brakes that donāt hold up:
- Changing wheels/tyres takes more time. I actually spent 10-15 seconds less time taking off and on a disc wheel, and the actual procedure of replacing a tube is the same regardless of brake technology. It may be faster for a pro mechanic in a race, but for us mere amateurs there is no practical difference.
- Compability. Sure, in a race it is beneficial to be able to safely mix and match wheels, but this isnāt an issue for the most part.
- Spinning rotors, aka āspinning bladesā, present a mortal danger. Years after disc brakes were introduced, we still donāt have a single rider whose legs or arms have been sliced off.
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There is a massive assumpton in the idea of āThe death of the rim brakeā
- that we change bikes every few years
- that we donāt have existing sets of wheels that fit various bikes and circumstances
- that somehow, because something new and shiney has come out we have to change.
- that it makes a massive difference.
- that it is better for the type of riding you do.
- something new coming out invalidates what already works.
All tosh as far as I am concerned.
If people in waves start getting rid of rim brake wheels we see a drop in price on ebay, but that is not happening. Sure, you can get the tubular version of rim brake wheels much cheaper than clinchers or tubeless, (which is great) but people said tubular were dead 15-20 years ago. I know plenty of TTers that still use them.
I guess, if you are buying new, donāt have existing wheelsets, and other bikes, and can afford the stock wheels and the new set in discs, (and you are happy to maintain them), and you donāt swap wheels between various bikes, and they suit the riding you are doing, then fine.
But they are not dead. They still work and live on just fine. They happily live alongside other choices.
I considered swapping from my lovely light (and deep) carbon Tubulars wheelsets I use on my TT bike, to tubeless. I would have to sell three wheelsets, and put in some cash just to get a set of racing wheels, and still have to fork out for training ones. And we are not even talking disc brakes here.
Horses for courses. Nowt wrong with using older stuff, in an environmantally friendly, minimal embedded carbon footprint, circular economy, sort of way.
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These arenāt assumptions.
Firstly you would need to quantify āmassiveā. If you canāt, which I donāt think you can because itās subjective, then you canāt say that this is an assumption.
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ā¦well if it makes no difference, why bother? The assumption is that choosing the disc brakes is substantially better. Hopefully it is not substantially worse 
A good set of rubber in the brake blocks makes a difference (eg Swiss stop). Happy to pay extra for that.
Type of riding. I can see it might help with mountain bikes and genuine off road such as gravel or CX. I donāt do either, so I canāt see a massive incentive to change.
I do a club group ride and a few of the guys have disc brakes. I avoid following their wheels on the left. A deraillieur seems a softer target. They say they are better, but I donāt feel outbraked. Outclimbed and out ridden definitely. 
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if you are concerned with your breaking inn bad conditions, get a cheaper bike with disk breaks, because is for the bad conditions, it is better to have it be cheaper. but have your nice bike be a rim break, because they arnt that much worse at stopping in good conditions with good pads, they are lighter, and more aero. on a mtb cx bike or gravel bike disk makes scene because they are on the dirt, that will impact the breaking performance with rm breaks. and with the massive tires on a dh bike it would be stupid to make rim breaks that can get around the tire