click of death

A standard ZIP100 Disk.

Click of death is a term that became common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in disk storage systems that signals the device has failed, often catastrophically. The term is also used specifically to refer to the failure of portable Iomega Zip drives or cartridges. The "click of death" can also be an informal warning system before the data on a data drive is lost.

Iomega Zip drives were prone to developing misaligned heads. Dust inside the Zip disks or cartridges could misalign the heads. Magnetic fields could also cause the drive heads to become misaligned, as the drives were not internally shielded from external magnetic fields. The heads would cause the data on the cartridge to become misaligned, rendering it unreadable. The Zip cartridges would also wear out, grow defects, or otherwise lose all four 'Z tracks'.

With a malfunctioning drive or cartridge, the drive heads would try to read the Zip disk, but not find a good Z track or hit a bad spot during a read operation. As part of the drive's retry program, the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing specific number of 'clicks'. After a data request fails, the drive parks the heads to clean them before trying again. Parking and relaunching would continue until the data was recovered or a set number of attempts was reached.

In rare cases, a Zip cartridge with disk edge damage could rip off the heads in a Zip drive. The damaged disks could go on to damage the heads of any other drive in which they were used. A previously good drive would click as if a miswritten cartridge was inserted. Replacement drives had a warning about damaged ZIP cartridges on a peel off label and quick visual inspection instructions. A lifetime warranty on the 100 MB cartridge was misleading to the actual cartridge life and future products like the 250MB offerings carry a 5 year or less warranty from Iomega.

Iomega received thousands of complaints about the click of death, but denied all responsibility — often claiming, to the fury of Zip drive owners, that the problems were caused by the use of (functionally identical) third-party media. A class action suit was filed against them in September 1998. (Rinaldi v. Iomega Corp., 41 U.C.C. Rep. Serv. 2d 1143) The case was settled in March 2001 and Zip drive owners were given a rebate toward the future purchase of an Iomega product.

On a hard disk system, the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon. The hard disk has a hard error or servomechanism failure, the head actuator will buzz and click as the drive tries to recover from the error. In most cases, the defect is due to physical abuse or a manufacturing error. IBM's storage division had their own click of death problems in 2001 with the mass failure of their popular Deskstar, dubbed "Deathstar", 75GXP hard disks.

In more recent years, this term has also been used to describe hard disk failure in Apple's iPod.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Blue Screen of Death
• Buzz of death
• Ping of death
• Zip of death

External links

• Comprehensive account of the click of death at grc.com
• More click of death info at grc.com including a drive testing program (TIP)
• grc.com's article on 'How Can I Cure Click Death' including drive replacement information and recordings of David Hellier, Iomega's General Manager of the Zip Aftermarket Business, saying "If our customers have a problem specific to this issue, whether it's in or out of warranty, we're going to take care of and replace the product if necessary."
• News article on the Zip click of death, from 1998
• Information on the Iomega class action and settlement
• 75GXP FAQ at anandtech.com
• Charles (CP3000) Technique repairs click of death

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