No need to
crack the case to unplug the cables (but that does save a small bit of power).
You Can set it to
None (turn it OFF) in the BIOS (Corporate users will probably be locked out of the BIOS. but, then what Corporate site
still has machines with floppies?) if you never use it.
You can always reboot and re-enable
if you ever do.
Caution: do NOT change any Hard drive or CD/DVD settings