Many different implementations of a disc-based storage media have been developed in the previous decades; some with fairly high market share and some that barely made it to production. These devices range in size from just over an inch (~30 mm) to over 12 inches (~300 mm) with the smaller formats typically used for consumer electronics and home computers while the larger formats were primarily utilized in medical, industrial, and other enterprise contexts.

The smallest commercial example of Disc-Based Enclosed Media (DBEM) is the DataPlay disk. Introduced in 2002 by DataPlay, Inc., DataPlay disks were intended to compete with the budding flash-based memory card market by offering a large capacity (250 MB per side, 500 MB per disk) on a 32 mm disc.

Their built-in DRM support and ability to ship with pre-recorded data helped them gain initial interest in the portable music industry, but the prevalence of CDs and the recent release of portable MP3 players made this a tough market to enter.

The short-lived iD Photo system — developed jointly by Sanyo, Olympus, and Hitachi Maxell — was announced to the public in July 1999, poised to enter the crowded market soon after. Sanyo and Olympus developed the drive mechanism, while Maxell was responsible for disk development. With a footprint of only 56.5 mm × 59.5 mm × 4.8 mm, the iD Photo disks were quite small in size, but boasted a storage capacity of 730 MB¹⁾²⁾.

The Universal Media Disc was developed by Sony as the proprietary optical format for the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which launched in Japan in December 2004. It consists of a 60 mm disc inside a plastic cartridge measuring roughly 64 mm × 63 mm × 4.2 mm³⁾. A dual-layer UMD holds up to 1.8 GB, enough for a full PSP game or a feature-length movie. Single-layer disks were also produced and had a capacity of 900 MB.

Unlike most other DBEM formats, UMD is a read-only, pre-pressed format: discs are stamped at the factory like a CD or DVD, and consumer drives cannot record to them. Besides games, Sony and several studios released movies, TV episodes, and music videos on UMD. The format faded quickly as downloads took over, and the digital-only PSP Go (2009) dropped the UMD drive entirely.

Introduced by Sony in 1992, MiniDisc was the most successful small-format DBEM. It was built as a recordable replacement for the cassette tape. The cartridge measures 70 mm × 67.5 mm × 5 mm and holds a 64 mm disc⁴⁾. Standard discs store 60 to 80 minutes of audio, compressed with Sony's ATRAC codec. Recordable disks use magneto-optical technology, while pre-recorded disks are stamped like a CD. MD was a major success in Japan and had a following in Europe, but it never displaced the cassette or CD in North America.

MD Data was Sony's 1993 adaptation of the MiniDisc for computer storage, offering about 140 MB per disk. It uses the same cartridge and 64 mm disc as audio MD, but the format is not interchangeable with audio MiniDiscs, and MD Data drives were sold in limited numbers. Sony later revived the idea with Hi-MD (2004), which raised capacity to around 1 GB and allowed general-purpose data storage alongside audio.

Of the different DBEM formats, 3.5 in (90 mm) was probably the most well adopted in the consumer market. It did not see much use in Western countries while it became relatively popular in some Asian markets (such as Japan). Cartridges have similar dimensions to a 3.5 in floppy disk, but they are about twice as thick. Capacities ranged from 128 MB to 2.3 GB across generations, and drives from the later generations were typically backward compatible with earlier media. Both rewritable and WORM variants were produced.

The 5.25 in (130 mm) cartridge was the workhorse of professional and enterprise optical storage. Capacities grew from roughly 600 MB in early generations to 60 GB in the final iterations. The size supported rewritable MO, ablative and MO WORM, and phase-change formats. It was widely used in workstations, document imaging systems, and automated optical libraries (i.e. “jukeboxes”), where many cartridges were managed by robotics for enterprise archiving.

The largest DBEM format, 12 in (300 mm) cartridges were used almost exclusively in industrial, government, medical, and enterprise archiving, where huge volumes of records needed to be stored permanently. They were most often ablative WORM, with capacities from a few gigabytes into the double digits per cartridge. Drives were large and expensive, and media was usually handled through high-capacity disk-changers. Few of these systems remain, and documentation is especially scarce.