7 storage drives that are officially too old for 2026
If someone had told me 20 years ago that CDs would be so obsolete that they are coming back into fashion today, I would have laughed. But CDs aren’t the only type of storage media that’s completely obsolete.
Some types of storage have been around much longer than any of us might have expected, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t on the verge of extinction. Although they’re still available on older computers or through convoluted adapters, these types of storage are officially too old, whether we like it or not.
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CD
I wish that wasn’t the case.
Compact discs (CDs) were once the stuff of dreams for all of us who owned a Discman and loved music. They replaced cassette tapes and VHS, but these days they’re as obsolete as they come.
Aside from music albums, CDs were used as general file storage in the 90s and 2000s. They had a capacity of 700MB, which wasn’t too bad at the time, but the advent of the DVD format obliterated CDs completely. 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 barely used. Worse still, most PCs no longer have a CD drive.
Magneto-optical disks (MO) and MiniDiscs
Other victims of the displacements that followed.
This one is a little more retro than most of the others on this list. Magneto-optical (MO) disks became commercially available in 1985. Even though they were optical disks, they were still treated the same as a hard disk by the operating system, allowing you to format them with common file systems.
Although CD-like on the surface, MOs actually had to be placed in a cartridge, making them look a bit like a large floppy disk.
The OM promised to ensure a good retention period for the archives; Unlike CDs, they prioritized reliability over read and write speed. If they survived the CD/DVD craze, we may have seen them used for cold storage these days.
MiniDiscs were small magneto-optical discs on cartridge, primarily designed for audio. Sony made these drives smaller in the early 90s and placed them in a case for portability. Designed to replace cassette tapes, these discs were used to store music, but they have all but disappeared, although Sony did not officially end their production in Japan until 2025.
M.2 SATA SSD
Don’t be mad at me.
In the middle between SSD and HDD, you will find M.2 SATA SSDs. But for how much longer?
These days, anyone with an M.2 slot will simply use an NVMe SSD. SATA SSDs make very little sense in every way that matters. They’re slower than NVMe drives and can’t even be defended on cost because prices have largely stabilized.
Who knows what will happen in the coming months, as NAND flash becomes more and more expensive; the price of all kinds of records could soon rise.
I understand the compatibility issues if you don’t have an M.2 slot, but if you do, there’s very little reason to buy a SATA SSD when NVMe SSDs are around.
DVD
I beg for a return.
DVDs were the official cause of death of CDs, but now they themselves are gone – and I wish they weren’t.
DVDs offer 4.7 GB of capacity, 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 DVD movies.
The only problem is that I (somehow) no longer own a device that can read them. Laptops and PCs have done away with DVD drives, and many PC cases no longer have an easy-access CD/DVD drive bay, as the front of the case is usually covered by a mesh panel for better airflow.
DVDs have had to bow out and give way to Blu-rays, which are currently the leaders in optical disc drives with a capacity of 50 GB. But even these are somewhat specialized; most people just watch their shows on Netflix, and NAS enthusiasts can set up their own Plex instead.
Hard drives
With some major caveats.
Look, I’m not saying that hard drives belong in the technological graveyard. They have many uses, but those uses should have very little to do with anything other than simple storage, at least for most people.
Compared to even an old SATA SSD, hard drives are so terribly slow that using them for booting/loading purposes is downright painful. At the same time, HDDs still perform well with cold storage and their price per terabyte is significantly better than that of an SSD.
Hard drives would be almost entirely obsolete without the amount of data we all have and need to store somewhere. SSDs are not great cold storage, so HDDs are useful, but they should never be used as a boot drive if there is another option.
SSHD
They were really just hard drives in disguise.
What would happen if you combined an SSD with a hard drive? 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 built-in NAND flash memory that they can draw on as an automatic cache, speeding up startup files or frequently used applications. To the operating system, this merger is still just one disk.
SSHDs entered the consumer market in the late 2000s, with the first models becoming commercially available in early 2010. They are still available for purchase, with newer drives offering 1TB to 2TB capacity with 8GB of NAND and speeds up to 4x faster than a traditional hard drive. But let’s be real: how many people still buy them? With the rise of NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs still around (even if they’re hanging by a thread), SSHDs have very little reason to still exist.
Floppy disks
If you think they are completely gone, this will surprise you.
They’re so outdated that they’re now called retro and end up in museums, but many of us used them long before CDs existed. There is something comforting about the sight of a floppy disk; often colorful, thin and almost extinct, but not quite.
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, appeared in the 1980s.
The capacities of these devices were a joke by today’s standards, ranging from 80 KB to 2.88 MB, although perhaps the most popular was 1.44 MB. That kind of tiny capacity quickly left them in the dust once better options appeared.
Floppy disks are virtually no longer manufactured, but they are still used in some industrial workflows. You will find them in existing equipment, in CNC machines, etc.
Floppy disks left a deep legacy in the standard backup icon, still used today.
It’s entirely possible that you still use some of the storage types on this list, and if you’re happy with them, that’s fantastic. However, it’s hard to deny that despite all this, the industry has largely moved on to greener pastures.
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