Oh sweet, my old Empire Earth box!

Incoming advices of external CD-ROM drives in 3, 2, 1...
- You can just buy an internal DVD-ROM drive and install it in your pc. If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard you can use PCIe expansion cards. Power can be supplied by Molex.
  
  ... Sata DVD-ROM drives are a thing
  Hell I've still got one just in case
  
  Bruh I'm comfortable building my own PCs and that still sounds way more effort than just buying an external optical drive with USB interface.
  
  If you lack an IDE port on your motherboard
  Bro, IDE has been dead for YEARS now, I'd be shocked if there was an IDE connector on any consumer computer made in the last 10 years (Industrial stuff can get weird)
  
  My pdu doesn't have molex connectors.
  
  yea, but that's pretty janky. external if you've got a small desktop or laptop - go internal if you can (still rocking my cd drive in my desktop)
  
  Most gaming pc cases now don't have any bay slots on the front panel. USB power buttons and audio plugs got moved to the top and all the slots for floppy and CD drives just vanished.
- Yo-ho-ho
- I mean... I have a usb external 3.5" drive...
  As well as DVD of course.
  
  I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.
  I've always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.
  It was late at night and I couldn't wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.
  I work in IT and people question my sanity when I'm walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.
  I never used it for it's intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.

You couldn't play it anyway. It has SecuROM as a copy protection and that is basically a rootkit that is not allowed to run on Windows Vista and above.
- Run it in a VM, then get the NoCD from gamecopyworld?
  (Not sure if that's an option for securom)
  
  Securom has been cracked long ago yeah. I believe it was SafeDisc or StarForce that made things hella weird in a cracked game, but that was bypassed by mounting the CD back then and now I think the cracks work too

Then you get a drive, but the game you loved is no longer playable since the server it is using to confirm its license has been offline for years.
- That's when you go find the 2002 keygen/crack.
  
  Yeah, but then it's easier to download the whole game rather than buying a CD/DVD drive.

I have an external DVD-RW on a shelf just in case. Every once in a while I need to bring it out and I wonder if a giant boulder is going to start rolling at me when I grab it.
- I actually have a SATA cable and power plug discreetly tucked in a spot in my PC case and have just taken the side off and plugged in a drive on occasion. It's normal purpose is troubleshooting other hard drives, but it works for that too
- I just bought an external cd/dvd drive so I can convert my DVD library into a digital one for convenience and to preserve the dvds longer.
  I'm having some issues with the speed of conversion, but my biggest problem is quickly becoming storage space.
  Also, I dug up some of my old games like Caesar III and installed a no-CD "patch".
  Good times.
  There's an adapter or replacement for everything

Drives are cheap

Pro tip: if you have a physical copy of a game and it's also available on Steam, try registering the CD key. (Obviously doesn't work if the game doesn't have a CD key. Or if the publisher is a dick. looking at you, EA)
- I never did it on steam but years back I contacted origin support and they let me register all my old ea games keys and still have them on the ea app. Not great but I thought it was cool.
  They let me do all of them except battlefield Vietnam. They said they didn't have that one available to download at the time.

USB Blu-ray is how I got my media library… totally…
- Someone else's DVD drive
- No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.
  I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.
  
  ISO gang here. Give me pure, unadulterated bit streams with menu-y goodness. I got the space available
  
  Automatic Ripping Machine

A USB DVD Reader/Writer costs 15 bucks. (I'm too used feel like that meme, and then at some point I needed to find a way to get a Mini-PC to read CDs, and as it turns out it's quite simple - I reckon it was more a case of "can't be arsed to do it" than a case of "can't do it").
- I wonder how long that price will last. We might be living in just the right time to buy a boatload of optical drives.
  
  Well, I got the ones I needed (I got 2, one for me and one for the person I was configuring a Mini-PC for) from China with Aliexpress, and in my experience you can usually find adapters for old tech directly from China even when stores in the West don't have those.
  In fact I was curious when I was writting this comment and I checked and it turns out they also have Floopy Disk USB adapters and, funnilly enough, they costs the same as the USB DVD Reader/Writters (which makes some sense as eventually the whole functionality is integrated and the cost is mainly the mechanical parts and assembly, plus those things are probably small manufacturing runs).
  Most electronics factories over there aren't exactly designing top of the range modern consumer electronics, but they're perfectly capable of designing even complex electronics products (in my experience, they have more trouble with software than hardware) - hence for example there are several Single Board Computer designers over there - and they're so many that they're constantly coming out with quirky products while competing with each other (and not all of which is stuff with lots of LED lights and which play some crappy jingles), so I guess it makes sense somebody over there would've created adapters for old storage media (in fact I was curious again, so I looked for and indeed found a "Vinyl player with USB recording").
  As long as Electronics in China keeps having the sort of competitive environment and lots of little factories like it was in the West before the 80s, I reckon somebody over there will keep on coming up with adaptors for old storage tech.

If you out the CD in the microwave for 15 seconds you can shrink it down to the size of a SD card, the SD card slot will read it.
- You know that this answer will be mashed into an "AI" training set somewhere.
  
  I remember back in the day when people were literally baking their nvidia GPUs in the oven to fix some solder issues, and cutting the PCI-E connectors to fit in an AGP slot. Can't wait for AI to bring that shit back.

External cd drive is so cheap it's almost free.

USB external optical drive with read and write capacity costs like 20€ where I am.

🏴‍☠️

Black and White

I keep the C&C Tiberian sun and the original Far Cry box for nostalgia.
- Tiberian Sun! I haven't thought of that one in forever.

What is this meme from? It looks so familiar
- Iron man.
  I think the third one?
  That's Tony's dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.
  
  Iron Man 2.
- Ironman 2

There's some slight benefit to having games that are just a sticker with a license number in the box. Probably, the only one benefit though.
- Until they remove it from the store.

I have an internal DVD-RW drive, but I disconnected the cable to use it for a new HDD I bought a few weeks ago
- You unplugged a DVD drive to plug in a hard drive?
  What does it feel like still living in 2010?
  
  Yes. I didn't have extra SATA cables

Despite only having a few disc drive dependent games, this and the amount of USB ports is why I got the budget desktop I got around a couple years ago. Having a disk drive has been great, especially when I got a few CDs and don't feel like using the old Sony Discman I got because it sometimes just stops after certain songs.
- With powered hubs and balanced tree topology, you can split a single root controller into 4⁵ endpoints. Your motherboard being able to support that many devices and the shared bandwidth might be a problem, but it's theoretically possible to survive off of a single USB port.

I still use a blu ray drive just to burn my M-Discs

I technically have a DVD drive/burner still. It's just not in the computer because the case didn't have any drive bays for it and I couldn't find one I could afford that had even one when I built this machine. I could just run it outside the case but... Nah.

I've got DVD-ROM drives in my desktop PC and my old laptop that I use for playing videos while I exercise and a USB Blu-Ray drive that I can use in anything else. You'll get my disc caddies when you pry them from my cold dead hands.

Simgolf

My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there's no physical eject button. It Just Works!