4 Old USB Gadgets That Are Still Useful

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What was as soon as new and cutting-edge expertise can shortly turn out to be yesterday’s information. I seen this after I lately attended the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Some of you would possibly bear in mind the likes of the Microsoft Zune, CD-ROM drives, and even HD video cassettes from years in the past.

It wasn’t till the early 2000s that the Universal Serial Bus (USB) protocol lastly took maintain of customers and allowed virtually each gadget to make use of the protocol, whether or not it was vital or not. This led to the market being flooded with all types of USB units. And whereas loads of these had been foolish who actually wants a USB ghost radar? -– many had been fairly useful and well-loved by tech fanatics.

But with tech altering and evolving so quick, are any of these older USB devices nonetheless helpful in 2026? You is perhaps shocked to seek out out that, sure, individuals nonetheless use a number of of those equipment at present. The advantage of time has really made many of those basic equipment more practical and helpful than they had been a long time in the past.

A conveyable CD and DVD drive will be extremely helpful at present. As somebody who has spent the higher a part of final yr ditching as many subscription providers as attainable, a tool just like the Ziweo External DVD Drive helped me on the way in which, as I’ve tons of of DVDs and CDs that I’ve collected and nonetheless need to take pleasure in.

But as a result of fashionable computer systems and laptops lack devoted CD and DVD drives, a conveyable model with a USB connection turns into vital if you wish to construct your individual home-based Netflix or Spotify-like different. Even for these not trying to create a house network-attached setup, a conveyable CD and DVD drive will be useful in the event that they discover outdated CD collections or choose up some DVDs from native thrift shops. 

With a conveyable drive, you possibly can pop in a disc and easily hearken to it. If you need, you possibly can then rip that content material to maintain it in your PC or ship it to a different gadget. Maybe you discover an outdated PC sport at your dad and mom’ home and need to play it once more. Having such a drive will permit you to set up it, as Windows’ backward compatibility is kind of good with older software program.

Sticking to my quest of attempting to ditch streaming and proudly owning content material, I bought a digital media participant in 2025 for the primary time since 2006, when the stick-shaped 1GB iPod Shuffle dropped. The concept of the common-or-garden MP3 participant form of fell out of favor when smartphones grew to become extra highly effective and began that includes huge storage. And then, when the likes of Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music made streaming of audio so easy, the period of the MP3 participant appeared gone.

However, the world of transportable audio gamers has gotten extra spectacular through the years, with high-end units now often known as digital audio gamers. Something just like the FiiO Echo Music Player is a superb instance of a formidable DAP with a ton of recent options. 

Featuring two high-end digital-to-analog converters, the FiiO Echo Mini helps FLAC, APE, M4A, OGG, and extra audio codecs, permitting for high-quality sound. You can use your basic wired headphones, making for a retro look that matches the unit’s cassette participant design. It even contains a digital display that may mimic a tape enjoying inside it.

Those outdated mechanical arduous drives are a factor of the previous for many people. The introduction of the solid-state drive made information switch speeds sooner and allowed machines and laptops to be smaller and slimmer. Then got here non-volatile reminiscence specific drives that did for SSDs what they did for arduous drives.

So, you would possibly assume that these huge, clunky HDDs can be out of date within the modern-day, however they will nonetheless be used for issues like archiving content material you do not plan on accessing a lot. This is a superb concept for a lot of, as HDDs designed for archiving have turn out to be fairly reasonably priced. If you have got or discover an outdated HDD and need to entry its information, you are going to want an HDD enclosure. I’ve an outdated USB HDD enclosure from effectively over a decade in the past that is nonetheless operating with an archiving HDD put in. It’s used to again up the recordsdata on my community just a few instances every week for added redundancy.

If you want one thing a bit of newer with extra choices and USB-C connectors, the BENFEI 3.5/2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD Enclosure is a superb alternative. These USB units have been round perpetually and make for a really low cost technique to again up information.

There is quite a bit to say about our fashionable cloud-based world. Uploading information to the cloud will be extremely straightforward and handy, with it usually solely taking just a few clicks of a mouse or faucets on a smartphone display. But generally we now have to ask ourselves what we’re dropping for less than a minor little bit of comfort. How a lot of your information really belongs to you, and the way a lot of it’s really personal? 

Major gamers like Google are weak to assaults, as hackers lately demonstrated they will invade Google Gemini and use it to hijack a wise house. And that is not even mentioning the notorious Apple iCloud hack that occurred virtually a decade in the past. That’s why one thing like a easy USB flash drive is vital. A drive like an Amazon Basics 128 GB Ultra Fast USB 3.1 Flash Drive provides loads of storage for a low value.

You have full management over the recordsdata in your USB flash drive. You by no means have to fret about an internet storage supplier being hacked, elevating subscription costs, or going out of enterprise sometime. If your web goes out, you continue to have entry to your recordsdata. So, if you’d like management over your content material, having a superb USB flash drive is extra vital than ever.

When choosing objects for this listing article, we scoured the web for suggestions from YouTube, on-line boards, and consultants within the area, in addition to those that nonetheless actively use and advocate these outdated USB units. We have additionally checked Amazon and researched consumer assessment scores to assist us compile our decisions. Each of the chosen objects featured right here has at the very least a number of hundred constructive critiques on the platform, lots of which have hundreds of critiques from glad customers recommending them to others.