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The first HiFD was launched in late 1998, boasting a capacity of 150MB and backwards compatibility with 3.5 inch floppy disks. It was available in Parallel port and ATA versions, with an SCSI version planned, but never launched. Its immediate competitors were the popular Iomega Zip drive, which had a capacity of 100MB and Imation's Superdisk , which was also backwards compatible with 3.5 inch floppy disks and had a capacity of 120MB. In spite of Iomega's healthy market lead, 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 displayed a tendancy for its read rate to drop into the low kilobyte 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, now sporting a 200MB capacity. However, the older 150MB disks could not be read or written to, while 720KB floppies was also unusable. The whole affair gave the HiFD a reputation for being unreliable, and by this time the Zip drive now sported a 250MB capacity and CD-RW drives were entering the mainstream. These factors doomed the second HiFD to failure.

Many people compared the HiFD to Sony's Betamax videotape format. However, while the failure of Betamax is often blamed on poor handling, it is likely that HiFD would ultimately have failed no matter what Sony did - CD-R(W) had a built-in advantage with the large number of CD drives in computers, and its higher capacity. The fact that Superdisk did not survive either is seen as the greatest proof of this theory.