No, a cd drive is not necessary for a laptop. Although there are laptops that lack a CD drive and instead use external solutions to perform this function. If the need arises, the laptop can be connected to a nearby desktop computer via a USB cable and then utilize its cd drive for reading or writing CDs/DVDs. However, SD cards have largely replaced discs as the means of carrying large amounts of data from one computer to another computer because they take up less space and are cheaper to boot. Plus an sd card reader is much more common on computers these days than a cd player- making them an even more practical choice than before so you don’t need to buy both an sd card reader and an external disc player separately.