I used them (zip 100) to bring files from work home and never had an issue. The old disks still read fine. Never knew anybody who did have issues with them back in the day either, but we quit using them when CDR's were cheap enough to buy. I would guess the later drives and disks were probably not well made.

These days I still use a ZIP now and then between older and newer Macs (external SCSI) when they don't have Ethernet. I use old kinds of retro removable drives with my collection including ZIP, Jazz, SyQuest, Bournouli, MO drives, etc.

I've seen the click of death but I've also had plenty work perfectly fine. Never had much experience with the 750MB ones. I recently got an external parallel and an external USB for the sake of transferring files between new and old machines without having to do anything crazy.

We had an old parallel ZIP-100 drive that developed the CoD (Click of Death), but the USB ZIP 250 Mb I later bought still works fine 15 years later...

I only had a single parallel port Zip 100. I used to visit my friends and "exchange" DOS games 😀

I had for quite some time after that, all the way into the early 2000s before I sold it. I always worked for me.

I heard their Rev drives were pretty alright, but if you dropped the disk cartridge you might as well have thrown it in a blender.

I still have my PPort/SCSI ZIP 100 drive as well as a ATA internal drive. Both still working. I also have 6 zip disks that are all working. I blanked them out about to sell them, but decided against it.

If I recall, one of the causes of the click of death was due to the edge of the media fraying. When this happens, the heads get sheared off. This will cause the head to do more damage to the disk.

Now when you insert a good disk into a bad drive, the heads can now do damage to that disk. Now if you put that damaged disk into a good drive, bye bye heads. Hence why the click of death was "contagious".

Now there was also a soft click-of-"death" (not really death) where the media was just hard to read. The head springs back to the edge to reset itself (to reset it's known position) and tries again - that is the clicking sound. Is the same reason why it does that when the heads were sheared off in the first scenario (can't read, so it keeps springing back to the edge to reset, tries again, springs back, repeat).

In the soft error scenario, however, if the disk is physically good, all you may need to do is just reformat the disk and it'll be good again.

If you ever come across a disk/drive combo that's clicking, first check the disk's edges to see if it's nicked, frayed, or uneven. Then check the drive to see if the heads are still attached to the armature. DO NOT stick another disk into the drive, OR stick the clicking disk into ANOTHER zip drive until you determine it's not a physical problem.

More info on this issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

Actually just dusting of my 2GB Jaz and 2 100MB parallel zip drives for a bit of a play.

Saved the Jaz from work, power adaptor is in a bad way but not sure how much use the drive got or for what, but works fine.

1 of the zip drives I got new for TAFE/College. Think that drive is the one that is now dead, Accepts disks but cant read them. It's been moved around a lot and served me well in the late 90's early 00's in fixing old PC's for friends without CD drives or without network card.
Not sure where I got the 2nd drive from. but that's working well.

I've been though fair few CD-ROM's, HDD's Floppy drives (and easy + 100 FDD disks) yet no one really complains about their reliability. All comes down to how you treat them.

I had one zip CoD out of 6 drives. It was a first gen SCSI model, and Iomega and they were gonna replace it. The claimed they sent a replacement (after I sent the bad drive in of course), but it never showed up. After 3-4 weeks the company claimed they would send another. It too went missing. Iomega just said tough luck and dropped the case. I gave up on them after that.

Back in the late 80's I had a number of bernoulli drives and never had a problem with them, so the company had earned mega bonus points in my book. But to rip me off the way they did, I grew to hate them.

I also had two SparQ drives that died on me. They were both replaced twice, and all the replacements died. Then they went under. I understand that the problem was fixed and the final batch was reliable, but I couldn't deal with the problem any more. When the zip drive died, then it was just the drive. The disk could be read in another drive. When the SparQ died, it corrupted the disk with total data loss.

In the end, HDD's started jumping in size by huge amounts, speed and bandwidth started shooting up and prices dropped drastically. Also flash drives had started to become a regular thing. I had bought an LS120 but never used it because of the improvements I mentioned. I just sold it and installed it in a clients file server. He made use of it for about 5 years.

The only good, and reliable removable HDD type drives I ever had was the old 20 and 44 MB bernoulli drives. I had a few WORM drives in the late 80's as well, but they could only be read by their own drives, and were very slow and cumbersome to use. They were really neat, but a major pain in the ass. I'm just happy that I can use little flash drives for common things, and a SSD in a portable enclosure for larger files. Some things are a thousand times better today and no amount of character on preceding technology makes me want to return to it. Modern mass storage is one of those things. But I still love older computers more than modern PC's. I stick modern mass storage in as many of my ancient rigs as possible, and I have no regrets.

Sparq was a Syquest product, not Iomega.

Yes, but others in the thread had asked about SparQ. I was simply responding with my personal experiences with both of the major, commercially available, removable mass storage devices.

The way the post read, it could be misconstrued as being made by Iomega. I don't think it's off topic or anything, I just want people to understand that both companies were making bad products around this time.