The design of current PCs is to have no physical removable media drives. High end gaming PCs especially try to be as minimalist as possible. No drives at all. Just an M2.SSD hidden out of sight. It does make it look super clean and tidy.

But this does assume we all now purchase digital downloads only and don't need access to anything we already own on disc. This only really a reality for those on very fast broadband too.

Do you still run physical drives in your PC?

I still have a Sony Blu-Ray writer in mine. Mainly to backup stuff and also for burning retro stuff. But also because I do still have a lot of older stuff on physical media.

But if I build a new gaming PC I probably won't have any as I've only bought digital games via Steam for years. But I would keep the existing system, or build a dedicated second system for legacy devices.
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I’m still using 2, one 16TB only for LaunchBox as that gets really big in size and wouldn’t fit on any SSD, and the second one I had lying around was a 12TB which I use for my downloaded PC games, and from there I install them to the SSD when I play them.
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I upgraded to an NVME SSD last year to get better speed, but stuck with a 500GB one (the same as my old SATA SSD) as anything bigger was too expensive. I also upgraded to a 4TB HDD for bulk storage. I have been doing a lot of video over the last couple of years so my storage requirements have gone up.

I do have a DVD-RW drive. I don't use it a lot these days but I do sometimes wish to watch video DVDs or read other optical disks, although I mostly reserve optical disks for older machines now.

I would however, like a built in card reader. I'm sure I could get a USB 3 one to go in the spare 3.5" bay. Currently I'm stuck with external card readers.
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Not a single rotational thing in my Z690 since late December 2021.

I run two x 2TB WD black's on a DDR4 adapter that comes with the board. ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme

Also, two x 1TB WD Black's on the Mobo in RAID0 for Bragging rights. - 14GB/Sec read, 10GB/Sec write.
It's purely Crystal Mark theoretical/synthetic speeds. In real terms, a single WD Black boots faster than two in RAID0 & unless you have a virtual drive to copy from, you don't get the true RAID0 speeds.

Then I have two Samsung Evo 850 500GB in RAID0 & two Evo 870 1TB in RAID0 in a Silverstone 5.25" 3bay Hot Swap box.

I pull my Dune 4K 6TB hard drive & plug into this box in the 5th bay, for faster transfers than Gbit offer. (10G around the household should have been affordable 24+ months ago....)

So yeah, no more "hard-drive spinny Mahoosive Magnetic" cr4p in this puppy, unless I'm putting a 4K Movie or two from the web of course!
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I'm trying to remember the last time I handed a disc or disk (note the carefully checked spelling there) when sat in front of the computer.... it's been a while.
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In my laptop i put an 500 GB in SDD and the previous HD on the place of dvd. The main Partition of windows is in SDD and what a difference it makes compared with old HD.
I bought a conversion bay to put the old HD in the DVD Slot.
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Changing a boot drive from mechanical to ssd has to be one of the biggest upgrades anyone can make. And these days there isn't really any excuse not to as they are affordable. Booting in a few seconds is mind blowing.

The jump from ssd to M2 is also as big, but not as revolutionary.
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