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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.

If you told me 20 years ago that CDs would be so obsolete that they’re now just coming back in style, I’d have laughed. But CDs aren’t the only type of storage media that’s completely outdated.

Some storage types have stuck around a lot longer than any of us might have expected, but that doesn’t mean they’re not nearing extinction. While still available in old computers or via convoluted adapters, these storage types are officially too old, whether we like it or not.

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CDs

I wish that wasn’t the case.

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Compact discs (CDs) were once the stuff of dreams for all of us who had a Discman and a love of music. They displaced cassette tapes and VHS, but these days, they’re as obsolete as it gets.

Music albums aside, CDs served as general file storage back in the 90s and the 2000s. They had a 700MB capacity, which was not too shabby back then, but the arrival of the DVD format completely obliterated CDs. They hung on for dear life when physical music albums were more popular, but now, with music largely being a matter of various streaming services (or vinyl, surprisingly), they’re niche and hardly used. Worse yet, most PCs no longer come with a CD drive.

Magneto-optical (MO) disks and MiniDiscs

More casualties of the drives that came after.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This one is a bit more retro than most of the others on this list. Magneto-optical (MO) first became commercially available in 1985. While they were optical discs, they were still treated similarly to a hard disk by the operating system, allowing you to format them with common file systems.

While similar to a CD on the surface, MOs actually had to sit in a cartridge, which made them look a bit like a chunky floppy disk.

MOs promised to deliver good archival shelf life; unlike CDs, they prioritized reliability rather than read and write speed. If they made it past the CD/DVD craze, we may have seen them used for cold storage these days.

MiniDiscs were small, cartridge-based magneto-optical discs, primarily made for audio. Sony made these smaller discs in the early 90s and placed them in a shell for portability. Made to replace cassettes, these discs were used to store music, but they’re all but gone now, although Sony only officially ended production in Japan in 2025.

M.2 SATA SSDs

Don’t be mad at me.

Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | reumont/Shutterstock

Smack-dab in the middle between the SSD and the HDD, you’ll find M.2 SATA SSDs. But for how much longer?

These days, anyone who has an M.2 slot will simply use an NVMe SSD. SATA SSDs make very little sense in all the ways that matter. They’re slower than NVMe drives, and they can’t even be defended on a cost-related basis, as the prices have largely evened out.

Who knows what will happen in the next few months, though, given that NAND flash memory is getting more expensive; all kinds of drives could go up in price soon.

I understand compatibility issues if you don’t have an M.2 slot, but if you do, there’s very little reason to buy a SATA SSDs when NVMe SSDs are right there.

DVDs

I’m begging for a comeback.

Credit: Sydney Louw Butler/How-To Geek

DVDs were the official cause of death for CDs, but now, they’re gone themselves—and I wish they weren’t.

DVDs offer 4.7GB of capacity, which is a massive improvement over CDs. I still remember writing data to store on DVDs a bit over a decade ago, and of course, I still have a robust collection of movies on DVDs.

The only problem is that I (kind of) don’t own a device that can play them anymore. Laptops and PCs nixed DVD drives, and many PC cases don’t have an easy-to-access CD/DVD drive bay anymore, as the front of the case is usually covered by a mesh panel for better airflow.

DVDs had to bow out and make space for Blu-rays, which are the current leaders of optical disc drives with 50GB capacity. But even those are somewhat niche; most people just watch their shows on Netflix, and NAS enthusiasts can set up their own Plex instead.

HDDs

With some major caveats.

Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek

Look, I’m not saying that HDDs belong in the tech graveyard. They have plenty of uses, but those uses should have very little to do with anything except plain storage, at least for most people.

Compared to even an old SATA SSD, HDDs are so painfully slow that using one for boot/loading purposes is downright painful. At the same time, HDDs still do well with cold storage, and their price per terabyte is significantly better than that of an SSD.

HDDs would be almost entirely obsolete if not for the amount of data we all have and need to store somewhere. SSDs don’t make great cold storage, so HDDs come in handy, but they have no business ever being used as a boot drive if there’s any other option whatsoever.

SSHDs

These were really just HDDs in disguise.

Credit: Seagate / Amazon

What would happen if you combined an SSD with an HDD? A solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD), apparently. These are basically normal spinning hard drives (2.5-inch or 3.5-inch) that have a small amount of onboard NAND flash that they can dip into as an automatic cache, speeding up boot files or frequently used apps. To the OS, this amalgamation is still just one drive.

SSHDs entered the mainstream consumer market in the tail end of the 00s, with the first models being commercially available in early 2010. They’re still available to buy, with newer drives offering capacity in the 1TB to 2TB range with 8GB NAND, and speeds up to 4x faster than a traditional HDD. But let’s face it: how many people actually still buy these? With the rise of NVMe SSDs, and SATA SSDs still being a thing to this day (although they’re hanging by a thread), SSHDs have very little reason to still exist.

Floppy disks

If you think they’re entirely gone, this will surprise you.

Credit: Angelo DAmico/Shutterstock.com

They’re so obsolete that they’re now called retro and end up in museums, but many of us have used them long before CDs were a thing. There’s something comforting about the sight of a floppy disk; often colorful, thin, and almost extinct, but not quite.

The first floppy was introduced in 1971, which, believe it or not, is now over 50 years ago. But the form factor most of us remember, the 3.5-inch, came about in the 1980s.

Capacities on these were a joke by today’s standards, ranging from 80KB to 2.88MB, although perhaps the most popular was 1.44MB. That kind of tiny capacity quickly left them in the dust once better options came along.

Floppy disks are basically no longer being made, but they’re still used in some industrial workflows. You’ll find them in legacy equipment, in CNC machines, and the like.

Floppy disks left behind a profound legacy in the standard Save icon, still in use today.

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It’s entirely possible that you still use some of the storage types on this list, and if you’re happy with it, that’s fantastic. However, it’s hard to deny that for all of these, the industry has largely moved on to greener pastures.