If you had told me 20 years ago that CDs would be so outdated that they are just now coming back into fashion, I would have laughed. But CDs aren’t the only type of storage media that is completely outdated.
Some types of storage have been stuck around for much longer than any of us expected, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on the verge of extinction. Although they’re still available in older computers or via complex adapters, these storage types are officially pretty old, whether we like it or not.
HTG Wrapped 2025: 24 Days of Technology
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CDs
I hope that’s not the case.
Compact Discs (CDs) were once the stuff of dreams for all of us who had a Discman and a love of music. They replaced cassette tapes and VHS, but these days, they’re out of fashion.
Music albums aside, CDs were a general file store in the 1990s and 2000s. It had a capacity of 700MB, which wasn’t too shabby at the time, but the arrival of the DVD format completely obliterated CDs. They held 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 almost never used. What’s worse is that most computers no longer come with a CD-ROM drive.
Magneto-optical (MO) disks and microdisks
More casualties from the drives that came after that.
This one is a little more retro than most of the others on this list. Magneto-optical (MO) disks first became commercially available in 1985. While they are optical disks, they are still treated similarly to a hard disk by the operating system, allowing you to format them using common file systems.
Although they look like a CD on the surface, they actually have to be housed in a cartridge, making them look like a chunky floppy disk.
MOs promised to offer a good archival shelf life; Unlike CDs, they prioritized reliability rather than read and write speed. If they had gotten past the CD/DVD craze, we might have seen them used for cold storage these days.
Minidiscs were small cartridge-based magneto-optical discs made primarily for audio. Sony manufactured these little discs in the early 1990s and enclosed them in a sleeve for easy transport. These discs were made to replace cassette tapes, and were used to store music, but are now gone, although Sony officially ended their production in Japan only in 2025.
M.2 SATA SSD drives
Don’t be angry with me.
In the middle between SSD and HDD, you’ll find M.2 SATA SSDs. But for how long?
These days, anyone with an M.2 slot will simply use an NVMe SSD. SATA SSDs are pointless in all the important ways. They’re slower than NVMe drives, and can’t even be defended on a cost basis, since prices have pretty much leveled out.
Who knows what will happen in the next few months, as NAND flash memory becomes more expensive; All types of drives may soon be priced higher.
I understand the compatibility issues if you don’t have an M.2 slot, but if you do have an M.2 slot, there’s little reason to buy SATA SSDs when NVMe SSDs are right there.
DVDs
I’m begging for it to come back.
DVDs were the official death of CDs, but now they’re gone, and I wish they weren’t.
DVDs offer a capacity of 4.7 GB, which is a huge improvement over CDs. I still remember writing data to store on DVDs a little over a decade ago, and of course I still have a solid collection of movies on DVD.
The only problem is that I (sort of) don’t have a device that can play them anymore. Laptops and PCs no longer have DVD drives, and many PC cases don’t have an easily accessible CD/DVD drive bay anymore, as the front of the case is usually covered with a mesh panel to improve airflow.
DVDs had to bow out and make way for Blu-ray Discs, the current leader in 50GB optical drives. But even those are fairly niche; Most people only watch their shows on Netflix, and NAS fans can set up their own Plex instead.
Hard drives
With some major caveats.
Look, I’m not saying that hard drives belong in a technology graveyard. They have a lot of uses, but those uses shouldn’t relate to anything except regular storage, at least for most people.
Compared to even older SATA SSDs, hard drives are so 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 much better than that of an SSD.
Hard drives would be almost completely obsolete if it weren’t for the amount of data we all have and need to store somewhere. SSDs don’t provide great cold storage, so HDDs are useful, but not at all possible to use as a bootable drive if there is any other option at all.
SSD drives
These were actually just hard drives in disguise.
What will happen if you combine an SSD with an HDD? Solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD), apparently. These are basically regular hard drives (2.5-inch or 3.5-inch) that have a small amount of built-in NAND flash that can be dipped in as an automatic cache, or speeding up boot files or frequently used applications. For the operating system, this consolidation is still just one drive.
Solid-state drives (SSHDs) entered the mainstream consumer market at the end of the 2000s, with the first models becoming commercially available in the early 2010s. They are still available for purchase, with newer drives offering capacities ranging from 1TB to 2TB with 8GB NAND, and speeds up to 4 times faster than traditional hard drives. But let’s face it: How many people actually still buy these products? With the advent of NVMe SSDs, and SATA SSDs that still exist to this day (although they’re hanging on by a thread), SSHDs have very little reason to continue to exist.
Floppy disks
If you thought they were completely gone, this will surprise you.
They’re so old that they’re now called vintage and end up in museums, but many of us used them long before CDs came along. There’s something comforting about the sight of a floppy disk; They are often colourful, delicate, and almost, but not quite, extinct.
The first floppy disk was introduced in 1971, which, believe it or not, is now over 50 years old. But the form factor most of us remember, the 3.5-inch, came out in the 1980s.
The capacities on them were a joke by today’s standards, ranging from 80KB to 2.88MB, although the most common was 1.44MB. This kind of small capacity quickly left them in the dust once better options came along.
Floppy disks are no longer primarily manufactured, but they are still used in some industrial workflows. You’ll find them on older equipment, on CNC machines, and the like.
Floppy disks left a profound legacy in the standard filing code, which is still in use today.
It’s entirely possible that you’re still using some of the storage types on this list, and if you’re happy with them, that’s great. However, it’s hard to deny that for all of these things, the industry has largely moved on to greener pastures.