History (1998): Sony HiFD 200MB Floppy Disk Finally Released

Announced in 1997, and delayed several times for technical problems, the 200MB floppy disk drive from the team of Sony for the drive and media, and Fujifilm for the ATOMM technology media alone, has been officially announced, with availability for the end of November for the parallel interface external version only.

An internal version will appear in 1Q99.

The starting price has been divulged: $199 retail for the drive, $15 for the Sony media, $14 for the Fuji media.

Initially, transfer rate was announced at a maximum of 3.5MB/s, but that optimal rate can only be attained on an IDE interface version not yet available. For the moment, Sony is citing a maximum of 600KB/s. The rest had already been revealed: read and write compatibility with 1.44MB floppy, 3,600rpm, flying head similar to a HDD drive head, super-thin, dual-layer, metal-coated recording medium, pre-recorded servo tracking signal, original TR-shutter design to reduce dust and debris entering the disk casting, V-lock mechanism ensuring that a HiFD disk cannot be mistakenly inserted into a conventional floppy drive.

Starting now, Alps and Teac, two companies licensed to produce the drives, will be able to get to work, Teac looking to a slim-line unit to begin with.

Takayasu Hirano, VP of Sony Electronics’ recording media and energy group, said: “We believe HiFD is destined to become the floppy disk of the 21st century.”

Imation and Iomega would surely not agree.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Sony can convince its OEMs, who have grown tired of waiting for the product.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 129 on October 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: HiFD never caught on because Zip disks and CD-R technology became popular.