With a storage capacity of about 680 megabytes, the CD-ROM quickly gained commercial acceptance as a superior alternative to floppy disks, which had a maximum capacity of only 1.4 megabytes. The significantly larger storage space of CD-ROMs allowed users to store software, multimedia files, and large amounts of data more efficiently. As a result, CD-ROMs became widely used in homes, educational institutions, and businesses for data distribution and storage.