I remember in the early 2000s right before the flash drive became a thing there was a type of new floppy drive. It had bigger disk space than the conventional 1.4 megabyte floppy. It was only around for a year or two before it got obsoleted by the flash drives pretty hard.
Does anyone remember that new type of floppy that was around for a short while right before flash memory became a thing?
There were many.
After 1.44 MB HD floppies, the same form factor was extended to 2.88 MB ED in 1988. Knighted by IBM using it with the 1991 PS/2 Model 57. ED became quite popular in Japan.
There were also Iomega's ZIP drives.
And LS-120 drives, also called SuperDisk drives, were compatible with the 1.44MB floppies, but expanded to 120 MB and later to LS-240 for 240 MB. These could also use the standard 1.44 MB floppy as a 32MB floppy.
There were also Sony HiFD drives.
And Caleb UHD144 drives.
I remember using Iomega Zip drives for the worst.
Those came in 100 MB which was huge. I had Syquest cartridges, but the reader was not external so you could not carry it somewhere else.
On my amiga, I had bought a SCSI version of the Zip drive which I could plug to my workplace Silicon Graphics IRIX workstation to copy downloaded stuff (56K modem was not very fast & was expensive). It worked well for a few months.
The big issue with them (and their drives) was the fact that they were expensive but also very fragile. If you made the drive fall off, it wouldn't work and damage the expensive disks you inserted afterwards. And if a disk was damaged it could damage another drive (see Click_of_death)
There were even internal Zip drives in some PCs.
Despite the multiple drives & disks lost, the format persisted, and I remember buying a 250 MB USB Zip drive for my Pentium laptop. That one failed miserably quickly after too. Some people never learn :)
Insite also made the 20MB "floptical" drive - the disks had the same form factor as 3.5" floppies, but were made of a slightly different material. A laser was used to heat a spot on the disk to make it susceptible to magnetization, allowing for higher write density.
I had the SCSI version on my Amiga. Bonus: it read/writes regular 1.44MB floppies as well, which the Amiga could not.
IMO the things that best fit your description would be.
There were other super-floppy formats too, but afaict these were the two most successful.
However, my experience is that, despite developing new iterations of their formats, by 2000 both of these products were being pushed out by the falling price of CD burners. CD burners had the massive advantage that while you needed a special drive to burn them, you could read them in virtually any PC. They did have some downsides though, mainly that software support for "packet writing" was a mess.
And as you say, in the mid 2000s, USB sticks became a thing. They were first introduced around 2001, but it took some time for them to become common and even longer for their capacities to catch up with CDs/DVDs.
There were also removable media formats based on hard drive technology, these offered larger capacity but were substantially more expensive and the disks were larger. The best known of these probably being the Jazz drive from IOMEGA.
There were magneto-optical discs. They were similar to the CDs, but the information was read and recorded by a combination of magnetical and optical means.
There was 120MB on a disk. It was not so costly, but still too much for home electronics. CD has killed it, by becoming quickly buyable for poor people around the world. (And, by being readonly, was also not easily duplicable.)
