What I never got was why MD were never pushed as main rw disc drives on PC. IIRC Rewritable MDs were mainstream long before CD-R and it would have filled an immense need to replace floppy disks at the time (I love vintage and nostalgia, but floppies had way too much io errors, and the speed was.. not really there).

Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..

What I had always wanted was a drive that played both music Minidiscs and MD data discs so I could also use the discs for both. At least I don't think there were any dual-use decks or recorders, and I couldn't justify getting a data drive when I already had a recorder. Back in the 90s I always assumed that was because Sony was paranoid about piracy; I even had to buy some kind of device so I could record digital audio from my computer directly onto audio MDs. (If I recall correctly, it's been a while!)

Minidiscs had a data capacity of around 150MB, IIRC. By that point Zip drives were already very common so you'd need a compelling reason for MD and I just don't think one was there.

I just wish pro-sumer LTO tape drives became a thing.

You could get them, although I've never seen one. I know someone who had a MD data drive on his PC which he used for copying large audio files onto (he had a multitrack recorder that also used them) with the handy advantage that they had considerably more capacity than Zip disks.

Apparently they were reliable but godawful slow, and he was glad to move onto SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards.

There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long.

The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were.

[0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.