I'm something of a data hoarder myself

Not sure about the minority now, but you will be in a few years if not already. Prebuilt PCs haven’t included optical drives as standard for years now, and good luck buying a new laptop that has one.

Optical media isn’t dead but it’s on life support and will become functionally obsolete in the next decade, same as what happened to magnetic media.

I have one as well in my PC of Theseus, it's been an ongoing part for more than a decade now. But, I also haven't used in in a year or more.
It's kinda funny to think back at how excited I was when my father first installed a CD-ROM drive in our home PC and knowing I could now get some of the newest games which were coming out on PC at that time. And now, I don't even know if my optical drive is still working.

I got an external Blu Ray drive. It's pretty sweet

I used mine 3 days ago. Admittedly, it had probably been a few years since the last time that tray opened, but all was good!

I have two that are constantly hooked up to my mac! One for ripping and burning CDs and DVDs (which I still do regularly, in fact I ripped five audio CDs just today) and one for ripping/burning 4k/blu-ray. I occasionally use both at the same time to make copies of discs, but my need for that is for part of a hobby project.

I got an internal BDXL drive and flashed firmware to make sure I can rip the 4K discs I started getting as part of physical bundles. Still need to start getting NAS drives to be ready for when my main PC stops being my daily driver+Plex Server before I had to get a new TV that could view them (still don't have a dedicated player and annoyed the PS4 Pro didn't ship with 4K playback). For now I can at least hook my PC to the TV if I really want to watch a disc.

My pc sonetimes doesn't start up, i assume the psu is wonky or something stupid like a wonky power button connector. I started to look into it and was shocked when i saw that my pc has a optical drive hidden behind a little hatch. I completely forgot about that. But also shows how much i need it.

I pulled one out of an old laptop and bought an adapter for that purpose. :p Adapter was like 5 bucks.

Who isn't keeping multiple vintage pcs? I keep a core2 system with a floppy and disc drives to deal with old media. It even has parralel and serial ports in case I need to deal with old hardware like zip drives. It has internal sata so it can boot from an ssd.

I used to have a USB floppy drive too. Now I just have disk images.

Same

For real. Given how many of the "attractive" cases are becoming very modular/config swappable, It would be cool to see even an add-on option for them that allows changing the faceplate and mount points for a 5.24in bay. Not expecting to see all the "fish tank" cases do this, but some could make it work. Maybe ones that are wide dual chamber ones with metal plate space could have a vertical option.

Freelancer was so fucking fun!

Can't believe there was never anything like it again.

Freelancer is free

Just looked it up and it was basically Orange Box before Half-Life 2

The problem with those is finding people to play with.

Where? That sounds like a good price as internal SATA BD-RE drives tend to be $60+