It's not so much that storage sucked, as the interfaces for storage sucked.

We didn't have much you could plug a better drive into. The floppy cable's protocol was too restrictive to support anything much fancier, exposing too many internal details. And the parallel port was awfully slow. And SCSI was unfortunately absent from the consumer hardware.

That made it really hard for anyone to make a better storage device, because it'd find itself immediately constrained.

It's only in modern times where we finally have technology-agnostic interfaces that make it possible to use any storage tech you like, bandwidth to spare, and a generic USB storage driver meaning that even if you do own some oddball device you can still plug it into any random computer and have it work out of the box.