There was a time when optical storage was all the rage, and was widely expected to replace all forms of both removable media and conventional hard disks. First generation CD ROM discs, for example, held over 600 MB of data, hundreds of times the capacity of a floppy disk, which was the dominant form of removable media at the time. Even hard disks of the time typically had capacities in the tens on megabytes. Optical storage had a huge advantage in the quest for raw capacity. Of course, things changed over time.
