They had a lot of issues with drive quality control. CD was already a very mature product and didn't have those same issues.
I had the exact opposite issue. All my zip disks lasted for years (decades I'm willing to be if I still had a computer with a drive). I have bought entire spindels of CD-R (not even getting started on the RW discs) that came 50-75% DOA.
It wasn't the disks themselves that had issues, it was the drives.
The Iomega "Click of Death" did them in, and the up-and-coming flash storage that killed CD/DVD/BR would have murdered them regardless.
Agreed. Flash storage changed the entire game. I worked at a digital camera repair place in the early 2000s, and I remember looking at the CF cards and the other occasional outlyers that came in, thinking "This is awesome. All this space on a tiny disk. This is gonna be the future."
Now we have 2TB of storage on an disk about the size of a few grains of rice. Sick shit.
Also, I've heard of the click of death. Perhaps it's because my systems all used internal drives that I never had issues. From what I have read, it's a bigger issue with the externals. To be fair, external everything is garbage. My first 2 cdr gigs were external. Slow, prone to fail on burn, had to be plugged in directly to the system and not a USB hub, etc.
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