All my machines have physical drives. They see occasional use. No where near as say 10 years ago when I was burning CD's every week for my rides to work. But good to haves all around.

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I have a DVD burner that I use for ripping CDs (I prefer buying CDs over downloads or streams) and watching movies occasionally.

When prune juice is insufficient, you shouldn't kid around. Mix 1 can stewed prunes, 1 can surströmming, 5 minced bhut jolokia peppers, and 3 tablespoons castor oil. Simmer on low for 1 hour and eat.

Guaranteed to unstuffage all backuppages. Even kitchen sinks.

I have a BD-R in mine. For backup purposes.

I've used a Drive/Burner far more for backups and far less for usage of games and media that it was designed for.

Consider you can get a DVD burner for about $40 right now, and each disc for 4Gb is something like 40 cents or so. A while back when calculating costs for backups i found the DVD discs (and likely now blueray) were cheaper than drives. However the drives have ease of use and easy to bring with you. Also with discs if one breaks or has errors, it doesn't necessarily mean the rest are ruined, i have backup discs 10 years old while external drives don't want to live past 4 years.

Tape drives can also give a huge amount of backup data for a small amount of space (although seek time is going to be slow).