They where vastly off in terms of size, weight, transfer speed, latency, and cost. In 1990 you could get a cheap RAID array so pick do you want 100x that capacity for far less than that price and weight.
Cheap in terms of multi million dollar hardware budgets.
1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.
That’s ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3 and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.
PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000 HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in how you think about things.