[akoster]

I still put DVD and/or Blu-ray drives in all PCs I personally build for myself and my family. This is due to the fact that we transferred dozens of old captured 16 mm and 8 mm film reels, scanned photo prints, negatives and slides as well as Video8, Hi8, Digital8 and VHS videocassettes to M-DISC DVD and some to Blu-ray. While I uploaded most of this content to Flickr and Google Photos while they were offering 1TB and unlimited storage (at reduced quality) respectfully, after both services curtailed their offerings, I realize the value in having a local, offline, physical copy of these precious memories. Thankfully my local computer store Micro Center still sells a few PC cases with 5.25 inch bays as well as optical media and disk drives.

Additionally, I find it useful for live booting GNU/Linux distributions such as MX Linux Workbench [0] or WinPE environments such as Hiren's Boot CD [1] without dedicating a flash drive for the purpose, which I may accidentally overwrite. And at the office, I have encountered several broken USB ports and while optical disk drive bays are often quite fragile, they tend to be in working order since they are often underutilized.

[0] https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-21-1-respin-workbench-released/

[1] http://hirensbootcd.org/