Click of death is way blown out of proportion. I don't doubt it happens sometimes, but it's not like every single drive is a ticking time bomb. I have at least seven of them in regular, active use, and have never seen it. My dad used to use one literally every day back in the '90s for bringing stuff to & from his office - I still have that drive and all his old disks, and they still work fine. If that changes I'll update my opinion, but keep in mind almost every desktop PC I own has one in it (including the modern ones.)

...THAT SAID, I tend to stick to 100MB drives. There's some rumor that quality went down with later versions (250, 750MB) but the disks for those are near impossible to find anyway. The old parallel / IDE/ATAPI/SCSI 100s have been totally fine in my use though.

The "click of death" only affects early 100 Mb models, AFAIK. The 250 Mb models are not affected (what 750 Mb version?), nor are later 100 Mb versions.

Then there's the Iomega Jazz drive, which should be avoided at all costs (and comes in a 750 Mb variant) because its reliability is horrible. The Jazz is not compatible with the Zip drive.

I own four Zip drive (3x 100, 1x 250) and they all work fine. Also, we don't backup crucial data on Zip disks these days anymore. So even if you get the Click of Death at some point, who cares? Trash it then and get a replacement one.

I personally have 3, all 100mb models. 1 internal, 2 external. One of the externals has failed, and it took some time and a rough life for it to go (many years of daily use, knocked over by pet iguanas a few times, etc). Honestly didn't know that this was a big issue till you mentioned it. I wouldn't worry about it personally, they seem to be every bit as reliable as floppy drives to me.

I have one zip drive 100 lpt, after all these years it works great, to be honest this zip drive my dad bought for use at work, it had lots and lots of use and it works, after it became obsolete on the work he boxed and maintained it properly stored.
It is awesome

I have three ZIP drives (two parallel ZIP100 drives and a USB ZIP250 drive), only one of them (one of the parallel ZIP100s) suffers from the click of death which can be heard once powered on. The other parallel drive doesn't click, but because my Windows XP laptop doesn't detect it (maybe a lack of drivers?) I'm not sure if it works. My USB ZIP250 drive still works perfectly fine with both 100 and 250MB diskettes, it even works on Windows 10!

As others have said, I don't use ZIP disks to backup important data anymore, I mainly use them to transfer data between a newer computer and an older computer.

.legaCy wrote:

I have one zip drive 100 lpt, after all these years it works great, to be honest this zip drive my dad bought for use at work, it had lots and lots of use and it works, after it became obsolete on the work he boxed and maintained it properly stored.
It is awesome

I wasn't aware of any click of death to be honest. My Iomega Zip250 USB still works fine, I carried that thing in around in my backpack for a while in college and it surely saw quite a bit of use.

the older LPT models seem to be much sturdier by design too.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

I have one zip drive 100 lpt, after all these years it works great, to be honest this zip drive my dad bought for use at work, it had lots and lots of use and it works, after it became obsolete on the work he boxed and maintained it properly stored.
It is awesome

I wasn't aware of any click of death to be honest. My Iomega Zip250 USB still works fine, I carried that thing in around in my backpack for a while in college and it surely saw quite a bit of use.

Sigh. 250 Mb models are not affected. Nor are USB models in general.

The "click-of-death" was an issue that affected a particular production batch of 100 Mb models, that got the Zip drive quite a lot of bad press. Our first parallel Zip drive was affected, and was replaced by one that still works to this day.
The whole issue was pretty big back in the day, because it caused destruction of the disks read by the affected drive and many people used Zip drives for backup. Most affected drives were thrown away, so it's unlikely affected drives are easy to find nowadays.

the older LPT models seem to be much sturdier by design too.

It was a design and manufacturing issue that caused the "click-of-death" in the first place... 🤣 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

Also, don't reuse disks inserted in a affected drive as they might be damaged and cause damage to other drives as a result. 😒

Also, don't reuse disks inserted in a affected drive as they might be damaged and cause damage to other drives as a result.

That is the great concern. The drives aren't cheap and are becoming scarcer. If you need more floppies you can just buy old disks in bulk on fleabay. If some don't work, no problem. You can't do that with Zip disks because bad ones may kill your drives. You have to buy new and unused disks to be sure. It's a major disincentive.

This is my Zip-100 drives, both had seen many poor-readable disks with endless "clicks" (when I was forced to turn off power to eject the disk) and have not dead. But none of them have been used with mechanically broken disks. The ATAPI one even used to repair one dead disk - I found that ZIPs with bad tracks (even with bad track 0) can be repaired by low level HDD utilities like "Victoria 4.47" just like HDDs. And after successful track 0 repair the disk was successfully formatted using "Trouble In Paradise", and now it is a normal ZIP-100 disk which I am using for data transfer between PCs and Macintosh. The SCSI ZIP is working with Mac IIsi (OS 7.1) even without any additional drivers (except FAT16 support extension).

I'd also bet any of the click of death models have died by now.
Of course they are still prone to die of something else, I have an external drive that worked when I put it away, 5+ years get it out and it doesn't turn on anymore.
(have another drive so seeing whats wrong is in the project for another day list)

zip drives are very well known for poor quality, and that is the case of why they die.

the quality is so bad, that after all these years i tried to open gently one and the hole you are supposed to push to release a tab just broke all the pastic, and i didnt even push it hard.

Once you open you see the mechanical parts...everything made of cheap plastic that bends easly. and there is not even 1 screw holding everything together, just holes on the case and in the hole goes another pastic leg, these guys went way cheap, i am surprised that not all died.

the power button for exampple is tied to the front cover with 2 dots of melted plastic

i even have one that doesnt even work , when i plug it in without any disc , both lights stay lit forever and does nothing.

that i saw with the first models zip100
not sure if the internal NEC ones are better, i think they should.

Cga.8086 wrote:

zip drives are very well known for poor quality, and that is the case of why they die.

the quality is so bad, that after all these years i tried to open gently one and the hole you are supposed to push to release a tab just broke all the pastic, and i didnt even push it hard.

This has nothing to do with the original quality, but with the aging of plastics throughout time. Some plastics, especially nylon (which is used in many mechanisms), will harden over time because the plasticizers leech out. If the item in question has been stored in hot places and/or directly exposed to sunlight and/or the weather this process is accelerated.

Once you open you see the mechanical parts...everything made of cheap plastic that bends easly. and there is not even 1 screw holding everything together, just holes on the case and in the hole goes another pastic leg, these guys went way cheap, i am surprised that not all died.

You must not have opened many disk drives. All-metal mechanisms are pretty rare in post-1960s hardware. The designs you describe are present in many different drives from various manufacturers, and only fairly rarely they lead to premature wear.