LS-120 drives were floptical drives that were backwards-compatible with 3.5" 1.44MB disks. IIRC you needed special media to use the 120MB capacity, but the same slot could accept the common 1.44MB disks and give you much better performance than normal floppy drives. The successor LS-240 drives also had the ability to write 32MB to a standard floppy disk using shingled magnetic recording.
If Zip disks, CD-R and USB flash drives hadn't showed up, these drives would have been pretty widely recognized as the next generation of floppies.
Almost all digital formats die in obscurity. 3” floppies, 5v SmartMedia, Jazz disks, and DAT were good ideas in the moment that were not good ideas a moment later. The logistics of reading even popular formats like Qic 40 and ADAT today are hard.
The most ironic thing, IMO, is that at the time everyone seemed to be holding their breath for Castlewood's 'Orb drive', which promised the perfection of a fast and big storage media.
It was delayed so long that by the time it actually reached the market it didn't get noticed.
Nope, NeXT had magneto-optical 128 MB drives, somewhat related. They were 3.5" but using an entirely different media, and were absolutely incompatible with ordinary floppies.
NeXT cubes used a 256 Mb optial drive, and some slabs has. 128Mb optical, and someone said that the turbo color slab had a 230Mb optical drive. Mine did not.
NeXT boxes used magneto-optical disks, which usually meant a laser was used to heat the magnetic material during the write process, and at lower intensity to read data optically. The optics in a floptical drive are just part of the head alignment servo mechanism, so it was probably much easier to make them cheap and backwards-compatible with mainstream floppies.
"Ordinary" floppies peaked in 1988 (yes, before IBM 1990 PS/2 2.88 ED) with 'Triple' or '2TD' format developed and shipped by NEC inside PC-88 VA3. 13MB unformatted, _9,120 kB_ formatted capacity. Triple because it tripled track density from 80 to 240 while reusing ED barium ferrite magnetic media and perpendicular recording head of ED drive, same ~100KB/s speed.
There was also the Sony HiFD Which was 200MB and used the same form factor disks as FDHD drives, thus maintaining compatibility.
It had a 'click of death'-like failure like Zip did though, and lost the battle during its recall and redesign. (IOMEGA were lucky in that the click of death didn't really kill Zip's market until about the time that CDR/CDRW was beating them anyway)
In the form of Zip disks, yes. I’m reasonably sure 3.5” disks, the last thing to be called “floppies”, topped out at 2.88M.