Oof, I felt that. I recall reading, many years ago, some statistics on how CD-ROM discs filled to about 600-650 megs made them much more reliable than the ones pushed to theoretical maximums. This was about regular, retail data CDs, not (re)writables.

I have always felt the floppy was a great demonstrator of the concept: a 3.5 inch might be perfectly fine for everyday usage and storage, but the moment you're trying to carry some data in 1.44 meg [0] zip portions, you're bound to find out just how many defective discs you had the entire time.

[0]okay, it was 1.37 meg of data actually IIRC but still