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Fun Fact: The Zip Drive's "Click of Death"

Abstract

In the late 1990s Iomega’s Zip drive was the removable-storage cartridge to own: 100 MB in a case barely thicker than a floppy, on tens of millions of desks. Then some drives started to click. A misaligned head would fail to find its track, retreat to its home position, and try again, over and over, with an audible tick. In the worst cases the bad drive scarred the cartridge, and the scarred cartridge then wrecked the next healthy drive it was inserted into. Users named the failure the “Click of Death,” and the name spread faster than any Iomega ad. A 1998 class-action suit followed. The phrase outlived the product and is now standard vocabulary for a dying hard drive.

The Sound

The Zip drive read and wrote with a head on a moving actuator arm, like a tiny hard disk. When the head could not track the surface, the drive’s recovery routine pulled it back to its home position and retried. Each retry ended with the head hitting its end stop, producing a click. A drive stuck in this loop clicked rhythmically, and a cartridge it had damaged would trigger the same loop in the next drive it touched, so the fault could jump from disk to drive to disk. Iomega’s own line was that a single click on insert or eject was normal, “like the predictable snap of a camera,” and that only repetitive clicking signaled a damaged drive or disk.

The term itself came from users, not the company. Mac journalist Tim Robertson said he coined “Click of Death” in a January 1998 article about his own failing drive; David Pogue repeated it in Macworld, and it was in print by January 30, 1998.

The Contagion Detective

Security researcher Steve Gibson turned the anecdotes into a diagnosis. He built a free Windows tool, Trouble in Paradise (TIP), that tested Zip and Jaz cartridges and drives more thoroughly than Iomega’s own software and could flag a marginal cartridge before it took a drive down. Gibson’s write-ups documented the cross-infection mechanism directly, one of his FAQ entries was simply titled “Is it contagious?” and gave home users a way to quarantine bad media instead of feeding it, disk by disk, into every drive they owned.

The Lawsuit

Iomega maintained the problem was rare. By early 1999 the company said the Click of Death affected “fewer than half of 1 percent” of Zip and Jaz users, though it had fielded thousands of complaints. That was enough for a class action: Rinaldi v. Iomega Corp., filed in Delaware in September 1998, alleged breach of warranty, consumer-fraud violations, negligent design, and failure to warn. In 1999 the court dismissed the implied-warranty count, ruling that the disclaimer Iomega had printed inside the box was effective, and the parties settled in 2001. Buyers of a Zip drive between January 1995 and March 2001 got rebates on Iomega products, and the company agreed to provide free technical support for clicking problems.

Cheap CD-R drives undercut the Zip’s price-per-megabyte within a couple of years, and USB flash memory finished the format off. See The Storage Revolution for how the removable-cartridge era ended. The engineering fault was ordinary; what made it history was the name. “Click of death” is now used for any hard drive audibly failing, a piece of consumer-advocacy folklore that a marketing department could never have written and could not erase.

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