I think I paid something like $240 for my first CD-ROM drive, which was a blistering 4x! It was on sale and I couldn't resist. When we bought Windows 95 it came on about 25-30 3.5" floppy discs. The box weighed a ton!
I remember seeing this device in magazines and always thought it would be cool to have one, but it quickly became a cool oddity as the prices of drives went down and their speed went up.