I have an optical drive on my desktop, it's handy for reading old DVDs and Blurays, which are actually a fairly cheap way nowadays to get media, and ripping off

I have an optical drive on my desktop, it's handy for reading old DVDs and Blurays, which are actually a fairly cheap way nowadays to get media, and ripping off of disks to digital formats is pretty easy. I wouldn't put one on a laptop at this point, but I'd probably keep one on my desktop, I still use the one I have on my desktop fairly regularly -- it's not just collecting dust. At the same time, I don't know that I would go out and buy a new model. I don't use my disk drive enough that I need to care a lot about having extraordinarily fast BD write speeds. :shrug: maybe the economics have changed and I'm being foolish buying SD cards and and external hard drives for archives instead of rewritable blu rays. But I feel like a lot of backups need to be mirrored to other mediums anyway to combat disk rot, so I'm not 100% certain that I'd like to have all of my backups sitting in a CD case to begin with. Seems like it would make retrieval awkward. Again, maybe the modern tech is different and Blu Rays are now an amazing way to store data. But mostly I use my drive for compatibility with older formats and as a way to get access to cheap media, and while I see that continuing to be useful, I'm also not hungering to update my setup or buy new devices.