Every Choice hotel has a letter number code. The hotel which was long a Comfort Suites near SNA (on Hotel Terrace Drive) is CA800. Is there any way to tell from that code when it was built?
A few years ago, it got re-flagged from Comfort Suites to Comfort Inn & Suites (since it wasn't all suites ever), temporarily going through the Clarion branding when it was rebuilding its lobby area and was without a Comfort-standard breakfast for a while (Clarion doesn't have a breakfast standard). So I'm just guessing that the Comfort Suites brand came before the Comfort Inn & Suites brand, and that some of the original Comfort Suites were like this one, and weren't really all suites. And this one is 100% external corridor.
All the hotels on this street (a Hampton which used to e Radisson, a Country Inn & Suites which was originally a Quality Suites, a La Quinta, a Best Western (now Plus), and this Comfort (Inn &) Suites, look like they may have been mostly built around the same time, because it's clearly a street dedicated to hotels. Perhaps if you can figure out when one of them was built, it will be big clue to when the rest of them might have been built, and therefore to whether this was one of the original Comfort Suites or not.