【海外の反応】「クリック・オブ・デス」知ってたら完全にオッサン説 Zipドライブの黒歴史

Just FYI, the "click of death" didn't apply to floppy disks. The term referred to the noise zip disks made when they head crashed. Zip disks weren't floppy disks despite the similarity in appearance. They were a hard disk with removable media.

I can hear this TIL 

Thanks, a lot………. The last time I heard that sound was when I was trying to finish up my senior project in college……. It did not go well and cost me another semester.

FUCK. YOU. IOMEGA.

Never a normal floppy disk. It was originally specific to Zip disks, which were an ultra high capacity storage format for the time, and used the same sort of rigid platters for storage as hard drives. It did later get used for actual hard drives.

Because both used swing arm type read heads that moved between the platters, such that any warping of the arm or the platters caused physical contact.

This didn’t happy with floppies because the media in those was a plastic film, with a single read head on a more rigid mount. So it didn’t generally make contact, and wouldn’t click if it did.

The Zip drive click of death has been described as a physical computer virus because of the way it could be transmitted from drive to drive. IIRC, what would happen is the magnetic head of the drive would come loose and create a tear in the magnetic medium of any disk it tried to read. Then, if the damaged disk was used in another Zip drive, the head of that drive would come into contact with the tear, snag on it and be torn loose. This would cause the second drive to damage disks in the same way as the first, and so on.

Just to note: I never heard this term used on 5 1/4" or 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks. It was specific to the IOMega drive, which was a popular, but proprietary format where the disks had 100mb or more. This was a serious problem because (a) they were much more expensive than regular floppies, and (b) they had considerably larger capacity (100mb vs 1.44mb) and thus were often used by creative professionals for multimedia projects or other large data needs. Thus the unexpected data loss had real consequences for these people who had paid for a premium device.

Legend at the time was if your zip drive or disk got The Click of Death, it could pass it on to a fresh, working drive or disk. It was communicable. So was the word on the street at the time.