A new Kickstarter campaign is betting that America’s “dead” disc collection isn’t dead at all, it’s just stranded.
The product, called Discore, is a portable USB CD/DVD drive and multiport hub that claims it can plug into iPhones, iPads, and Android phones using OTG-style connections, letting users read (and potentially burn) discs without hauling out a computer. The hook is the price: $39 for early backers, pitched as 50% off a planned $79 retail price.
Since launching June 28, 2026, Discore has quickly turned into a small crowdfunding hit, tapping into a very modern problem: most new laptops and tablets don’t include optical drives, but plenty of people still have photos, home videos, and old work files trapped on CDs and DVDs.
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Kickstarter backers push Discore past $45,000 in under a week
Discore’s Kickstarter goal was a modest $500, more a formality than a real manufacturing benchmark. The campaign blew past that almost immediately, pulling in more than $45,000 from over 750 backers in less than a week.
Pricing is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The main tier sits at $39, while an even cheaper $35 “super early bird” tier was offered to the first wave of supporters. The campaign also pushes bundle deals, $69 for two units and $89 for three, aimed at families, small teams, or anyone who expects multiple people to need disc access.
As always with crowdfunding hardware, fast funding doesn’t erase the usual risks: production delays, quality control issues, and the reality that returns and customer support can get messy once devices ship at scale.
The big promise: plug a disc drive into iPadOS and Android
The campaign’s headline feature is mobile compatibility. Discore says it works with iPadOS and Android devices via OTG, allowing users to connect the hub to a phone or tablet and access files on a CD or DVD.
That could be genuinely useful for people trying to pull old family photos off a CD, open archived documents on a DVD, or grab files from a client who still hands over deliverables on discs.
The campaign also suggests users may be able to burn discs from a phone or tablet, if they have compatible software. That’s the part that deserves skepticism. Reading discs is usually straightforward; burning them reliably often depends on the operating system, app support, file formats, permissions, and whether the device can properly control and finalize a disc-writing session.
For more traditional setups, Discore also claims compatibility with Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux.
A 9-in-1 hub that tries to replace your dongle pile
Discore isn’t just a disc drive. It’s marketed as a “9-in-1” hub with SD and microSD card slots, multiple USB-A ports, and a USB-C port. Campaign images indicate four USB-A ports plus one USB-C port, clearly aimed at people who routinely juggle flash drives, microphones, mice, external SSDs, and memory cards.
On paper, the specs are solid for a travel hub: up to 10 Gbps over USB (consistent with USB 3.2 Gen 2 branding) and SD card read speeds up to 160 MB/s using UHS-I. Real-world performance will depend on the cards, cables, internal controller, and the host device.
The pitch is convenience. Instead of packing a USB-C hub, a card reader, and a separate external DVD drive, Discore claims it can do it all in one box, an appealing idea when name-brand adapters can get expensive and cheap generic ones can be unreliable.
The tradeoff with all-in-one gear is that everything shares power and thermal headroom. Discore’s campaign highlights a silver-white aluminum-alloy body designed to stay light and help dissipate heat, an important detail for disc burning, which is more demanding than simple playback.
Old-school disc speeds, modern-day use cases
For the optical drive itself, Discore lists up to 24X read/write speeds for CDs and up to 8X for DVDs, typical numbers for portable external drives in 2026. The point isn’t speed records; it’s getting through stacks of discs without turning a weekend into a month-long digitizing project.
The campaign is aimed at creators, photographers and videographers who still encounter discs in the wild, but the bigger market may be ordinary households. Plenty of Americans have shoeboxes of CD-Rs labeled “2009 Photos” or DVDs with home movies, backups, and old tax records. When your MacBook or Windows ultrabook has no disc slot, accessing that data becomes a real obstacle.
If Discore’s phone-and-tablet compatibility works as smoothly as advertised across a wide range of devices, it could become a practical bridge between yesterday’s storage and today’s workflows, less about reviving DVDs, more about finally escaping them.
