The Iomega Zip Disk and the Click of Death

The original Iomega Zip Disk commercials caught my eye; they featured some men dressed in lab coats talking about the amazing storage potential of the new Zip disks, and then for some reason jumping out of a plane.

Regardless of whether the commercials made sense, they worked; the disks were very popular, though not quite popular enough to keep the new form of media afloat as CD burners became popular. Sure, Zip disks could hold from one hundred to two hundred fifty megabytes (and eventually 750 megabytes), but CDs were much cheaper, and even if they weren't rewritable, they could hold around 700 megabytes. Eventually, the Iomega Zip Disk was rendered practically obsolete for the home computing market.

There was another reason, however, for the Zip disk's decline. A dark secret for Iomega that haunted them in the past and continues to haunt them today.

Zip disks sucked.

The construction of a zip disk is similar to the construction of a standard floppy disk, with drive heads reading the diskette as it spins. However, Zip disks were prone to a problem called the "click of death", which is every bit as bad as it sounds.
The heads basically become dirty and rip up the edges of the diskette, permanently damaging the disk and occasionally the drive. This makes a clicking sound that is anything but pleasant as your data's permanently scrubbed away.

Many Iomega Zip drive users found out the hard way that the click of death is pretty much the most fully destructive problem that any form of media has on a regular basis; the disks are frankly of poor construction, and the problem's never been adequately corrected. Iomega was even taken to court over the Zip disk's faulty construction; that's where the click of death got national recognition, and the term's been a part of geek culture ever since.