The Sony HiFD (High capacity Floppy Disk) was a high-capacity

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

system developed by

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

and

Fujifilm , trading as , or simply Fuji, is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the areas of photography, optics, Office supplies, office and Biomedical engine ...

and introduced in late 1998. Development and sale of the drives was discontinued by early 2001. Announced in October 1997, HiFD disks offered a capacity of 200 MB while maintaining backwards compatibility with standard 720 KB and 1.44 MB diskettes. Sony initially planned to begin shipping the drives in the first half of 1998, however, the introduction was delayed until the end of the year.

TEAC () is a Japanese electronics manufacturer. TEAC was created by the merger of the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company, founded in 1953, and the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, founded in 1956. Overview TEAC has four divisions: *TASCAM - con ...

and

Alps The Alps () are some of the highest and most extensive mountain ranges in Europe, stretching approximately across eight Alpine countries (from west to east): Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. ...

also planned to introduce HiFD drives. The first drives to reach the public were external

parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers ( personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once (paralle ...

models priced at $199. An internal ATA version was later offered, with a

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

version planned but never launched.

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

offered an internal HiFD drive as an option on some of its workstations in 2000. Its immediate competitors were the popular

Iomega Iomega Corporation (later LenovoEMC) was a company that produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, i ...

Zip drive The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities ...

, which had a capacity of 100 MB and Imation's Laser-Servo LS-120

SuperDisk The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 Megabyte, MB floppy disk. The SuperDisk hardware was created by 3M's storage products group Imation in 1996, with manufacturing chiefly ...

, which had a capacity of 120 MB and like HiFD was also compatible with existing floppy disk formats. Many observers confidently predicted that the HiFD would swiftly take over the market, and ultimately replace the floppy drive. This did not happen, however. A few months after launch it emerged that the HiFD suffered from frequent crashes during read/write operations, and had a tendency of having its read rate drop into the low kilobyte per second range, effectively rendering it unusable. Initially it was thought that a new driver could solve these problems – instead, Sony issued a full recall at the start of the following year. The HiFD was re-released in November 1999, using a

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

connection for the external drive. The whole affair gave the HiFD a reputation for being unreliable, and by this time the Zip drive now sported a 250 MB capacity and

CD-RW RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, r ...

drives were entering the mainstream. These factors doomed the second HiFD to failure.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{Cite news , url=https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/08/technology/news-watch-with-new-disk-drive-inventor-of-floppy-competes-with-itself.html , title=NEWS WATCH; With New Disk Drive, Inventor Of Floppy Competes With Itself , author-last=Austen , author-first=Ian , date=1998-10-08 , newspaper=

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

, access-date=2018-07-24 , language=en {{Cite web , url=https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/00q4_sony.pdf , publisher=

Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (imaging and sensing), ...

, title=Financial Results For The Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 2001 , author-last= , author-first= , date=2001-04-27 , website= , access-date=2018-07-24 {{Cite web , url=https://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/199710/97-1014/ , publisher=

Sony Japan , often abbreviated as SMEJ or simply SME, and also known as Sony Music Japan for short (stylized as ''SonyMusic''), is a Japanese music arm for Sony. Founded in 1968 as CBS/Sony, SMEJ is directly owned by Sony Group Corporation and is opera ...

, script-title=ja:プレスリリース{{! ソニーと富士フイルム、現行3.5型フロッピーディスクシステムと互換性を持つ大容量200MBの3.5型フロッピーディスクシステム『HiFD』を共同開発 , author-last= , author-first= , date=1997-10-14 , website=www.sony.co.jp , language=ja , access-date=2018-07-25 {{Cite news , url=https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB880760285621552000 , title=Comdex Trade Show Offers Few Humdingers But at Least One Threat to Iomega's Zip Drive , author-last=Savitz , author-first=Eric J. , date=1997-12-01 , work=Barron's , access-date=2018-07-25 , language=en-US {{Cite news , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QDwEAAAAMBAJ&q=sony%20hifd%201997&pg=PA44 , title=Sony and Fuji to add third high-capacity drive to the fray , author-last=Schwartz , author-first=Ephraim , date=1997-10-27 , newspaper=

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (''IW'') is an American information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a Web-only publication. Its parent company is International Data Group, and its sister pu ...

, access-date=2018-07-24 {{Cite news , url=https://www.deseretnews.com/article/664814/SONY-device-is-hot-item-Iomega-pushes-its-Clik.html , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180726005848/https://www.deseretnews.com/article/664814/SONY-device-is-hot-item-Iomega-pushes-its-Clik.html , url-status=dead , archive-date=26 July 2018 , title=SONY device is hot item; Iomega pushes its Clik! , author-last=Fidel , author-first=Steve , date=1998-11-25 , work=DeseretNews.com , access-date=2018-07-25 , language=en {{Cite web , url=https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1695.wss , title=IBM Launches Low-Priced Workstations for Complex Digital Design , author-last= , author-first= , date=2000-06-06 , website=www-03.ibm.com , language=en-US , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180726005804/https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1695.wss , url-status=dead , archive-date=26 July 2018, access-date=2018-07-25 Sony products Floppy disk drives Computer-related introductions in 1998

See also

References