During the 1990s, I mostly built my own computers (and for others). I hated all the junk apps the store-bought computers had on them. I was really big on doing "clean" OS installs, so I would frequently back up my data and format my hard drive so I could do totally clean installs of MS-DOS and Windows right from the source disks. I also edited my autoexec.bat and win.ini file to eliminate most programs and processes from running at bootup. That approach did make my systems run lightning fast.
Your experiences roughly paralleled mine during that time period. It is amazing that when set up clean and right that the much lower power hardware we had then had quick start up times and snappy performance for the tasks that we used them for.
I still have a Zip drives and media for them as well. Most of them were 100MB but they had variants that had 250MB and 750MB. I have the Jaz variant and media which have 1GB of storage. I also have the Clik! variant which hold only 40MB but are tiny, barely bigger than a Compact Flash Card. The drive that they use fits in a laptop's PCMI slot. I purchased an expensive little MP3 player that used them. The SCSI versions of Zip drives were considerably faster than the parallel port versions for most applications.
I actually donated a bunch of Zip drive media to the fire department that I worked for. The department used them for a bunch of purposes and when they became hard to find it became a problem. Previous to those drives I had a couple of multi-track tape storage units...
I haven't checked any of these devices out for a long time. The 100MB Zip drives and the Clik! drives are pretty robust but the Jaz drives were expensive and notoriously undependable.