Your old optical drives still have one storage trick SSDs can't quite replace

Published Oct 1, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. You've probably heard that CDs, DVDs, and physical media in general are experiencing a resurgence. Makes sense. I have so many different subscriptions to various streaming services, I'm seriously considering ditching it all and just collecting DVDs again. At least they're mine for life, then. But physical media as means of storage? In those cases, these CDs and DVDs end up listed among the storage drives that are officially too old in 2026. I agree, but I also don't, because those old drives still make a lot of sense when all you need is a good archive, and they actually can one-up your SSDs in a major way. The useful part of an optical disc is that it stops changing A burned disc can become a snapshot instead of another writeable drive I'm pretty sure that most of us have used optical discs for storage at one time, although perhaps pure archives weren't exactly the goal. Burning CDs was very much a thing 15+ years ago, and I still have stacks upon stacks of CDs and DVDs from those times. The thing is, I never made them with the goal of backing stuff up; it was more about sharing files or moving them easily at a time when cloud storage wasn't as widespread. Regardless of what you use them for, though, it's important to note the most basic difference between an SSD and a standard DVD-R or CD-R (and no, I don't mean the shape). Those drives are write-once media. This means that once you've burned your files and finalized the disc, that's it; there's no going back to change something. Meanwhile, an SSD is obviously the opposite, in the sense that you can write and rewrite files to your heart's content. Sounds like a downside for CDs/DVDs? Nope. Not at all. For pure archiving, that limitation is actually a boon. Think of it as creating a snapshot of your files instead of another drive that stays editable forever. Once you burn a finished project, you can eject it, put it away, and store it for years with some degree of confidence that your data will remain 100% the same the next time you check it out. (Of course, you should still follow the 3-2-1 rule for important files regardless.) When you're done with a CD-R/DVD-R, the data is both physically offline and effectively immutable. Malware can't reach it while it's sitting in a box, backup software can't mess with it, and you can't even absentmindedly delete something. There's a lot of forethought involved in dealing with physical media, and that's a big perk that doesn't apply to SSDs. That makes an old DVD burner useful for small, finished archives 4.7GB sounds tiny until you stop trying to back up the whole PC Obviously, I'm not telling you to chuck all your SSDs and just use DVDs instead. There are some limitations, which is why these types of backups are more suited to certain files than others. The main downside is the size. Even a tiny 120GB SATA SSD has a big edge over the maximum 4.7GB a DVD-R has to offer. But this is only a problem if you're thinking of these DVDs in terms of actual big-ticket backups. That's not how I use them. For me, these kinds of archives make the most sense for files that are important, but also finished. Stuff I'm unlikely to need anytime soon, and if I will, I know I won't need to make any changes to. Think old photo scans, family photos, documents, etc. That use case makes an old optical drive feel less obsolete. It's made to handle a single job. An important job, but still just one job. Meanwhile, your SSD can chew through gigabytes of data in a short time, and it'll let you re-do that entire workflow again if you need to change something. I would still choose an SSD for almost every other storage job Optical storage only makes sense once speed and convenience aren't important Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek As mentioned above, SSDs are vastly superior. They just don't have that built-in permanence that physical media does (which is, coincidentally, also why people are abandoning streaming services for physical drives—it's just a different side of that permanence). Beyond that, they're so much faster, they hold way more data, and let you change that data however you want, whenever you want. If you're working with active projects, an SSD, internal or external, makes way more sense. CDs and DVDs are archives. They don't have to be fast, and they don't have to be flexible. They just have to let you take a certain file (or a thousand of them) and keep it as is for the rest of time. The bigger risk may eventually be finding something to read it with There's an obvious added risk or problem with using optical drives: you can't read them as easily as you used to. Desktop PCs have largely replaced optical drives with fancier, more airflow-promoting front panels in their cases. Laptops have long given up on the idea of an optical drive. But with physical media going through a bit of a renaissance, we might still be able to buy these old players for many years to come.