timppu: Every piece of hardware will eventually fail at some point. What will you do with your boxed physical games then?
Sell them on the retro market for insance prices :D
My Voyager Borg Cube is worth 500€ and I payed 120€for Turrican 2 DOS.
timppu: Emulators and other means to make old games run on modern machines is a much more future-proof method. Then I can rest (more) assured that my existing games will run also on my next PC, even if it has no e.g. optical drive to install and run boxed games. You could still buy an USB DVD-RW drive, but I've heard they don't necessarily work right with all sorts of old CD/DVD copy protection methods.
The drives are ok. USB or not doesn't really matter. But modern Windows versions don't allow certain types of access or copy protection drivers like Tages.
It was a pain when it still worked, so I usually cracked my originals anyway.
I agree, emulators and virtual machines will be the future. Thanks to AMD we can still run 32 Bit software on our computers, but at some point I think those will have to be emulated just as 16 Bit DOS and Windows 3.11 software, depending on how long 64 Bit architecture will remain the way to go.