A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?

[Zac67]

Very close. MO is a magnetic storage that's written to laser (heat) assisted and read optically - reliable but slow when writing. Floptical is just as you said. It never took off as it wasn't cheap and not very reliable. Then CD-Rs came into fashion, very quickly displacing everything else.

[Zac67]

LS-120 aka Superdrive is using pretty much the same technology as floptical but uses another name for legal reasons.

[Zac67]

Bernoulli and the derivative Zip drives use non-contact heads while floptical and LS heads do have contact with the media surface.

In contrast to harddrives - where the heads fly over or under a rigid surface - Bernoullis use flexible media that in turn fly under a rigid (yet radially moving) head.