That view of the market trend meshes with what volume IT reseller CDW Canada is seeing in the market. Daniel Reio, director of marketing for CDW Canada, said CDW sees optical drives continuing to decline in popularity due to increasing high-speed Internet connectivity and the prevalence of large USB drives and portable USB hard drives.

"The trend toward software licensing via downloadable media will continue, which means the need for an optical drive will continue to decrease," said Reio. "This decline has been coming for some time, though the need for an optical drive remained on laptops so that users could play DVDs while travelling. But even that need is declining due to the prevalence of downloadable video content."

CDW isn't writing off the optical drive entirely though. Reio said the optical drive's most important role will probably remain as a recovery device, since the standard practice to recover a PC today is by use of an optical disk.

And not everyone is bullish on the death of the optical drive. Tim Brunt, senior analyst, personal computing with IDC Canada, said some strong use cases for the optical drive still remain.

"I don't think it's going to go the way of the floppy," said Brunt. "There are certainly good reasons to have an optical drive, maybe just not internally to the device anymore."