alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
> The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed
I wouldn't say Zip didn't catch on, there were a few years where Zip drives were pretty ubiquitous. MD Data had a price problem. The drives were expensive ($500+) and the disks were nearly $30 IIRC. Meanwhile a Zip drives and disks were half that or less.
On the whole they just did not offer enough storage over competitors to justify their price. When CD writers got cheap they were better in almost every way.