There were multiple approaches to design such media, for example ZIP (100MB back then), which died due to reliability issues, JAZ, which died for the same reason, and DVD-RAM, which had rather slow access time and little market penetration.
I experiented with ZIP and DVD-RAM, and while the former still works (first generation high-quality drive) but is too small to be of any practical use today, I had never success with the latter due to many issues with the file system implementation under linux. Frankly, it was only half as useful as it could have been, and I found USB-sticks much faster, more convenient and a lot more reliable than any removable medium that requires some sort of mechanical interaction with the player device (such as rotating the disk).
LS-120 was a nice one too. But yeah; the capacity is simply to low to be of any use today.
