4 Old USB Gadgets That Are Still Useful

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What was once new and cutting-edge technology can quickly become yesterday's news. I noticed this when I recently attended the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Some of you might remember the likes of the Microsoft Zune, CD-ROM drives, and even HD video cassettes from years ago.

It wasn't until the early 2000s that the Universal Serial Bus (USB) protocol finally took hold of consumers and allowed almost every gadget to use the protocol, whether it was necessary or not. This led to the market being flooded with all sorts of USB devices. And while a lot of these were silly who really needs a USB ghost radar? -– many were quite helpful and well-loved by tech enthusiasts.

But with tech changing and evolving so fast, are any of those older USB gadgets still useful in 2026? You might be surprised to find out that, yes, people still use several of these accessories today. The benefit of time has actually made many of these classic accessories more effective and useful than they were decades ago.

A portable CD and DVD drive can be incredibly useful today. As someone who has spent the better part of last year ditching as many subscription services as possible, a device like the Ziweo External DVD Drive helped me on the way, as I have hundreds of DVDs and CDs that I've collected and still want to enjoy.

But because modern computers and laptops lack dedicated CD and DVD drives, a portable version with a USB connection becomes important if you want to build your own home-based Netflix or Spotify-like alternative. Even for those not looking to create a home network-attached setup, a portable CD and DVD drive can be handy if they find old CD collections or pick up some DVDs from local thrift stores. 

With a portable drive, you can pop in a disc and simply listen to it. If you want, you can then rip that content to keep it on your PC or send it to another device. Maybe you find an old PC game at your parents' house and want to play it again. Having such a drive will allow you to install it, as Windows' backward compatibility is quite good with older software.

Sticking to my quest of trying to ditch streaming and owning content, I purchased a digital media player in 2025 for the first time since 2006, when the stick-shaped 1GB iPod Shuffle dropped. The idea of the humble MP3 player sort of fell out of style when smartphones became more powerful and started featuring massive storage. And then, when the likes of Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music made streaming of audio so simple, the era of the MP3 player seemed gone.

However, the world of portable audio players has gotten more impressive over the years, with high-end devices now known as digital audio players. Something like the FiiO Echo Music Player is a great example of an impressive DAP with a ton of modern features. 

Featuring two high-end digital-to-analog converters, the FiiO Echo Mini supports FLAC, APE, M4A, OGG, and more audio formats, allowing for high-quality sound. You can use your classic wired headphones, making for a retro look that matches the unit's cassette player design. It even features a digital screen that can mimic a tape playing inside it.

Those old mechanical hard drives are a thing of the past for many of us. The advent of the solid-state drive made data transfer speeds faster and allowed machines and laptops to be smaller and slimmer. Then came non-volatile memory express drives that did for SSDs what they did for hard drives.

So, you might think that those big, clunky HDDs would be obsolete in the modern day, but they can still be used for things like archiving content you don't plan on accessing much. This is a great idea for many, as HDDs designed for archiving have become pretty affordable. If you have or find an old HDD and want to access its data, you're going to need an HDD enclosure. I have an old USB HDD enclosure from well over a decade ago that's still running with an archiving HDD installed. It's used to back up the files on my network a few times a week for added redundancy.

If you need something a little newer with more options and USB-C connectors, the BENFEI 3.5/2.5 Inch SATA HDD/SSD Enclosure is a great choice. These USB devices have been around forever and make for a very cheap way to back up data.

There is a lot to say about our modern cloud-based world. Uploading data to the cloud can be incredibly easy and convenient, with it normally only taking a few clicks of a mouse or taps on a smartphone screen. But sometimes we have to ask ourselves what we are losing for only a minor bit of convenience. How much of your data actually belongs to you, and how much of it is truly private? 

Major players like Google are vulnerable to attacks, as hackers recently demonstrated they can invade Google Gemini and use it to hijack a smart home. And that's not even mentioning the infamous Apple iCloud hack that happened almost a decade ago. That's why something like a simple USB flash drive is important. A drive like an Amazon Basics 128 GB Ultra Fast USB 3.1 Flash Drive offers a lot of storage for a low price.

You have full control over the files on your USB flash drive. You never have to worry about an online storage provider being hacked, raising subscription prices, or going out of business someday. If your internet goes out, you still have access to your files. So, if you want control over your content, having a good USB flash drive is more important than ever.

When selecting items for this list article, we scoured the internet for recommendations from YouTube, online forums, and experts in the field, as well as those who still actively use and recommend these old USB devices. We have also checked Amazon and researched user review ratings to help us compile our choices. Each of the selected items featured here has at least several hundred positive reviews on the platform, many of which have thousands of reviews from satisfied users recommending them to others.