Sony initially planned to begin shipping the drives in the first half of 1998,[4] however, the introduction was delayed until the end of the year.
The first drives to reach the public were external parallel port models priced at $199.
Many observers confidently predicted that the HiFD would swiftly take over the market, and ultimately replace the floppy drive.
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.