Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0], which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that.
Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.
I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.
I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.
They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive