Weren't the old Bernoulli drives pretty robust? The disks themselves were something of a wear item IIRC, but I don't think they had any catastrophic failures.

I doubt they'd be that usable for retro systems, though.

Agreed. While Zip and Jaz (and Clik,) may have been less than reliable, the much older Bernoulli were rock solid reliable.

What about Ditto drives?

Anonymous Freak wrote:

Agreed. While Zip and Jaz (and Clik,) may have been less than reliable, the much older Bernoulli were rock solid reliable.

Makes one wonder what went wrong?

Click of death is blown WAY out of proportion. I've been using zip drives since they were current (not just on PCs - samplers, music gear, etc.) and never had one fail. My dad used one daily for years before he retired & he never had any problems either. I found his old drive in his un-climate-controlled garage a while ago and now I'm using it. I don't doubt failures *do* happen but they're not the ticking time bombs everybody says.

FWIW I've heard the quality issues were worse with the 250 and 750MB drives, but I've had a track record of ZERO problems with all types of 100MB ones (parallel, SCSI, internal, external, etc.)

I HAVE had an LS120 drive fail, but it was pretty beaten up when I got it.

First Bernoulli Box was real beast, second was a little bit worse, but still great, I wish I could get them. But from the standpoint of ZIP, JAZ, Clik!, the idea was great, but quality was worse. ZIP100 was OK, I use for quite some time, but I have some which has tons of bad clusters and a few broken drives aswell. Ditto were reasonable. I am searching for pretty much everything made by iOmega with media, but it is really hard to find anything, especially where I live.

xjas wrote:

Click of death is blown WAY out of proportion. I've been using zip drives since they were current (not just on PCs - samplers, music gear, etc.) and never had one fail. My dad used one daily for years before he retired & he never had any problems either. I found his old drive in his un-climate-controlled garage a while ago and now I'm using it. I don't doubt failures *do* happen but they're not the ticking time bombs everybody says.

FWIW I've heard the quality issues were worse with the 250 and 750MB drives, but I've had a track record of ZERO problems with all types of 100MB ones (parallel, SCSI, internal, external, etc.)

I HAVE had an LS120 drive fail, but it was pretty beaten up when I got it.

Everyone's experience is different. I've had 7 or 8 Zip-100 drives of all kinds (ATA, SCSI, parallel) all fail with the click-of-death within 2 years of use. Both at home and work.

I think I have about 5 zip 100 drives in the house right now, and only 2 are known to work. I still need to try out a couple more.

The ones that don't work do the "power light always stays on" thing which I've read is a full death indicator. I don't have any clicking devices though...so I guess that's something.

I just really wanna make use of this stack of zip disks since ya know, I already have them 😀

Have used my internal zip100 for years on end back in the day, no problems. Last year i installed it in a retrobuild of my and it still works without any problems. All disk 9 pieces work without problems. Bought a external zip100 usb, and that also worked. Got a jazz drive from somebody, but that won't work. Don't know if it's the drive, disk or the port i used. It came with a usb to scsi port.

Supposedly, the click of death only affects the older ZIP-100 drives. USB drives should be fine.

Does anyone have one of the Syquest drives? I'm curious if they were any better than Iomega products.

The earlier ZIP 100s were fine too - something went wrong with QC along the way. And I heard it could be a viral problem... a bad disk can induce COD.

Now calling a drive "Clik!" was simply tone deaf...

gdjacobs wrote:

Does anyone have one of the Syquest drives? I'm curious if they were any better than Iomega products.

Curious about this too

None of my ZIP drives failed while I used them. I did see many that were defective, I simply didn't buy these (used a flashlight to shine into the drive so I could filter out all the funny looking ones and only buy the ones that looked ok).

I do have the suspicion that these drives are kinda fragile and I noticed many people ramming the ZIP disks into the drives while I tend to gently apply pressure but only just enough so the drive wil "absorb" the disk.

I have several ZIP100 and none failed until now. I have no statistics, however my impression is that the Click of Death is exaggerated. Maybe it is like Tetrium noted some way of usage that makes the occurrence of this situation more probable.

I've got a 100 and a 250 internal ATAPI/PATA/IDE drive in my retro systems and I bought them WAY back in the day and they still work perfectly fine now. And my old ZIP drives, the ones I still have....still have the original data left on them. I have old-ass pictures, game saves, DexDrive archives, etc. and they're all readable. Even my old-ass 18-year-old Pentium II motherboard works fine - WITHOUT a recap job done.

Yeah, I know how to take care of my sh**. 🤣

gdjacobs wrote:

Does anyone have one of the Syquest drives? I'm curious if they were any better than Iomega products.

I bought a new SparQ parallel port drive in 98, at the time I did hesitate with a 750MB drive from Nomaï, but that company was just on the verge of closing down, so I did choose the Syquest drive, for customer support you know!
Funnily enough, Syquest closed down not long after too, mostly due to the Sparq and SyJet quality problems.

I think the parallel drive still works, but years later I got a 2nd hand IDE one, and it's possible that the internal one suffered the SparQ death as I remember it refusing to read a disk for no reason.
The SparQ death goes like this: a drive damaging disks so much that trying them in an other functioning drive would damage it, and so on and so on.
I have about 10 new sealed disks, so I could try them again at some point...
One other funny thing, despite the flimsy eject button on the drive, if you eject a disk with the door open, the disk almost goes flying!

The one I really wanted back then was the Castlewood Orb, but it hadn't been released already, and was slightly more expensive, no idea how reliable it ended up to be.

I'd heard about their SparQ problems. I'm curious if their smaller drives, the ones that competed with the Zip drive, were more reliable.

Some time ago I threw out a shoe box full of Zip 100's - at least 1/3 were bad or going, maybe more. Hard to tell since the 4 or 5 internal Zip drives were all unreliable to begin with. My personal experience with them at home and work was abysmal. Work colleagues faired no better. I'm actually astonished to hear of people that cruised through the "Zip Age" without issue...