Best external Blu Ray drive

Many slimline laptops these days eschew any kind of disc drive entirely. It’s certainly nice to have small, light and thin laptops for a commute or other use on the go, but this can leave you hanging if you ever do need to burn something onto a disc.

There’s also small form factor desktop machines that don’t offer any kind of disc drive functionality.

In many cases, a spinning disc is a legacy format, not something that is widely used any more, as cloud storage or flash storage offer less cumbersome methods for transferring data around, but the humble disc drive is not entirely obsolete yet.

For interfacing with disc and players for TVs, it can be handy to read and write files to and from different formats of discs. Whether you’re interested in backup up your movie collection, sharing home videos with family members, or making mix CDs to take in the car, an external disc drive can be a real handy tool for managing audio and video files on their native format.

There’s also the security offered by using a more disposable format. If you have sensitive documents that you want to keep hard copies of, then destroy when they have served their use, a disc copy is a great tool for doing that. For files that are not sensitive, but intended to be shared, you can also pass around copies of files on discs without having to worry about getting them back, whereas for USB storage you’re out of pocket more than a few pennies if you lose a high capacity USB drive.