https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm

https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm

Some good reading and explanations as to why this happens IMHO (and I'm sure some will disagree with Steve Gibson's findings 😐 ).

computergeek92 wrote:

Didn't the click of death on iomega zip drives happen mostly on certain model external drives? I've used many 3.5 bay internal zip drives and I never had any problems over the years.

I have had the exact opposite experience. I have used many Zip drives back then, of many types - mostly SCSI, but a few were parallel port, and even 3 or 4 IDE. This was mostly at work, but a few also in my home machine. Every single one of them died with the click of death within 1-3 years of purchase. One even died in the first 2 weeks.

I have 4 drives (2 x 100MB IDE, 1 x 250MB IDE and 1 x 250MB USB) that don't read anything. What a bunch of crap.
But I do have 2 JAZ drives still going strong!

still have my original ide zip drive, and it works without any problem. i also have a usb zip drive and that one is also working flawless.
i recieved a jazz, but that one i cannot get to work. have to try it on older hardware.

Granted I've never been a heavy Zip drive user, but I've never had trouble with any of the ones I've used, which includes several internal IDE, an external USB and external parallel. I recently got an external SCSI Zip 100, but I do not yet have any computers to which I can connect it to try it.

I had one incident probably 10 years ago with one cartridge but I didn't lose any data and the SCSI drive in my mac never clicked again once I threw the cartridge out.

More recently I was in the process of backing up a cartridge after I seemingly lost my backup of that. I was about two directories in before the USB drive that was plugged into my PC began scrubbing and spit the cartridge out. Whatever the hell happened mangled the thing so badly I couldn't even format it again. My copy of AutoCAD R12 and AutoSketch are gone for good. 🙁

I've had two 1gb JAZ cartridges randomly die on me and between two drives and ten cartridges, I have a 100% failure rate with the 88mb Syquest cartriges.

Sorry for necroposting, but I was googling to figure out if Click of Death also happened on 250MB drives because I saw one for sale at a very cheap price, and started playing around with the five 100MB drives I own. For some reason, they were all doing the CoD sounds, some more than others, two not even recognizing floppies, despite only one being marked as BAD with a permanent marker. So I google for a few solutions, and found one on a dead page about slightly moving the head mechanism forward. I did it to the BAD drive and it's now the only drive working perfectly fine! I ran two 100MB floppies through the Trouble In Paradise software, the first gave 2 soft errors, the second not a single soft/firm/hard error! I will try to do the same to the other drives, one will definitely be added to my Windows 98 computer, along with the rest of the arcaic hardware already in there. It started as a retro gaming computer, but it's now also a retro hardware hoarder computer, because why not? 😀

This just goes to show you that the problem varies from drive to drive, and sometimes there's no problem at all other than stuck mechanisms or other simple solutions, most probably due to lower quality materials used on later drives to cut costs without the proper testing.

If someone else finds an old ZIP drive with the Click of Death problem, just google for some workarounds that people tried through the years, maybe it will work for you or maybe it won't, but in the end you might be saving one more old piece of hardware from permanent death.