Click of death

Click of death is a term referring to noticeable clicking sound in various kinds of disk storage systems that signals the device has failed, often catastrophically. The term is also used more specifically to refer to failures of Iomega Zip drives or a damaged cartridge.

The term became common in the late 1990s, describing a problem particular to Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives. Zip disks, (also called a cartridge.) although popular, were not particularly sturdy (being exposed to the dust and grime of an unfiltered environment), and the drives were prone to developing misaligned heads. This could misalign the data on the cartridge and ruin the cartridge. A bad drive could take awhile to show up. Yet using a damaged cartridge in a good drive would result in the clicking as the good drive could not read the misaligned data.

The cartridges would also wear out by grown defects, wear, or otherwise loose all four 'Z tracks'. So a bad drive or simple wear can kill the cartridge. 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.

In any case the heads would try to read a disk, not find a good Z track or hit a bad spot during a read operation, then the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing specific number of 'clicks' as part of it's read retry program.

The reason the drive clicks is that when the Zip drive parks its heads, they pass through a cleaner which supposedly is to clean the heads by removing magnetic residue, and at the same time the drive would recalibrate the heads.

In rare cases a damaged cartridge with damage to the edge of the disk would rip off the drive heads themselves.

Compounding the rare problem, the damaged disks would often go on to damage the heads of any other drive in which they were used - this usually only happens if the disk itself was frayed - it may "behead" the drives. In other words, that a perfectly good drive would start clicking just as bad as if a miswritten cartridge was inserted.

The only utilities to test the ZIP cartridge were made by a 3rd party: GRC. (www.grc.com) Due to SpinRite’s ability to find and recover drive errors Steve created TIP, Trouble In Paradise that can scan the entire cartridge. It also has the best research and info on the specifics of the drive design and this error condition presented to the public.

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.

Iomega also manufactured a smaller-sized version of the Zip disk, called the Clik! drive. This product, perhaps for the reasons above, was renamed to PocketZip.

Once a popular replacement for the floppy disk, ZIP drives are now obsolete due to cheap CDRW’s and other higher capacity offerings like UBS keys.

On non-Zip systems (usually a hard disk), the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon; when a 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. Since the media is not removable on these drives, the defect is almost always 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.

External links

See also

External links