I have a DVD rom burner as well as a DVD/Blu-ray drive.

Yes, but I don't often use it. The main use I've gotten from it over the years is Vudu's disc to digital conversion service. It was quite handy for that.

I'm planning to do a rebuild in at some point in the next year and I'm not sure if I'll bother to include one again.

I still have my optical drive and I need to keep it since I still have hundreds of German games GOG might get interested in and I need a way to transfer those files from disc to GOG (far better idea than just sending them the discs ... I am sure the ones I've sent them years ago in the meantime have learned to talk fluid Polish ;)).

My PC was built around 2012, so yes. Setting aside the fact that it doesn't really get used, I wouldn't get rid of it because I've had to boot from a disc previously when Windows updates have screwed up my computer.

...Though, an optical drive was once the cause of a few days of work trying to get my old computer to work again after Prince of Persia 3D messed it up. I think I may have actually used a floppy drive for some boot bypass code in that instance.

I just updated my case not long ago and I no longer have an optical drive.

Sure, and brace yourselves: got a floppy plus a Zip drive stuck in there as well!

i buy pre-built, so they come with it anyway, dont really use it tho but i still have disc games

Not entirely but I put it forward as the main one of the few advantages optical drives still have. When I'm downloading something big, it takes hours and eats up all my bandwidth unless I limit the download speed, which prolongs the time it takes to download even more. Recently, I was downloading Sacred 2 and it took more than 5 hours (luckily, I'm finally getting faster internet this Thursday). When installing from a DVD, I can do whatever while the game installs AND it's faster. I'm also kind of bound to it due to my decent collection of boxed games (many of which still can't be gotten anywhere).

The above pertains mostly to games. Everything else, I agree that CDs and DVDs are obsolete.

Yes, because I'm not thick enough to make my retail collection useless, nor do I believe digital-only is the way to go.

Yes.

Optical drives are effective and cheap solutions for a multitude of PC applications and others besides.

This is despite various industries trying to class them as obsolete.

Stop using them if you want to play their game and good luck with cloud.

I'm rocking two in one build and a single in the other. I've got a ton of discs I refer to from time to time. I'm the guy who also gets bent if I don't have have the ability to plug a cat5 into my laptop.

Wireless and digital media are convenient, but when things go south, I like to have "options".

I see I'm in the majority of 76% (at this point in time) having a built-in optical drive.

...and there I was thinking I'd be cool and different, but I'm just a commoner :(

Next thing people will tell me DRM-free has gone mainstream!

Slightly off topic, I think an optical drive is critical in keeping important data from being tampered with. I'm sure there are niche USB sticks and hard drives with write-protect toggles, but I'd trust something that doesn't need a toggle far, far more.

My gaming PC, which I use exclusively for gaming, does not have one since it's a low-noise power-packed mini-ATX-like box.

My gaming laptop, which I also use for other things like development and day to day stuff does have one. I occasionally use it mainly for archiving stuff (I have several DVD-RW/DVD+RW discs which I'm still using for that purpose).

Ehm, ok... and just how old are they though? Because, you know, these things don't last forever.

I quote an excerpt taken from the link above: "Manufacturers claim that CD-R and DVD-R discs have a shelf life of 5 to 10 years before recording, but no expiration dates are indicated on CD-R, DVD-R, or DVD+R packaging, nor are there published reports of tests to verify these claims. Still, it would be prudent, in light of these claims, to purchase new discs as they are needed rather than to order large quantities and stockpile them for future use."

My main gaming PC (laptop, ASUS G75VW) had an internal DVD-RW drive. However, I used it less and less and at some point I also noticed it seems to have become broken, having issues reading about any CDs or DVDs which would read fine on my old desktop PC.

So I recently replaced it with a hard drive chassis which allows me to have a third (internal) hard drive, so now I have 3x 2 terabyte hard drives in my laptop, yay! (Two of them are reserved for Windows 7, one for Linux Mint).

But I still have an external USB DVD-RW drive as well, which I am using right now, copying the rest of my old CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to a big external 8TB hard drive so that I can throw all those old CDs to trashbin. Just today I threw like 50 of them into trash, saves space.

The other uses I have for the optical drive is if I play some old retail game I have on CD, or if I want to rip some of my old DVD movies into digital .mkv video files. Generally I am using an optical drive less and less, so an external USB DVD-RW is suitable for me for occasional use. It doesn't make sense for laptops to have optical drives anymore, taking space even though you use it very rarely, if at all.