Talk:Click of death

...of death
I'm not very familiar with the term "click of death" but presumably it must have been derived from the blue screen of death, or visa versa? -- MacAddct1984 21:21, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Possibly, but I believe it has to do more with the fatalistic view that data on the ZIP disk and the ZIP drive is unrecoverable and unrepairable, respectively.--Kevin586 22:26, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

mouse clicks of death
Mention other clicks of death. E.g., I almost clicked my mouse on a virus infected link, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.201.31.246 (talk • contribs) 22:04, 11 March 2006


 * No. That already has a name -- PEBKAC. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.25.37.170 (talk) 21:17, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

"head crash" or "servo failure"
"The term is also used more broadly to refer to failures of several other kinds of disk storage systems. In all cases, the click of death is characterized by a noticeable clicking or buzzing sound and is usually caused by a head crash."

"On non-Zip systems (usually a hard disk), the click of death refers to a similar phenomenon; when a hard disk has a hard error or servo failure, the head actuator will buzz and click as the drive tries to recover from the error"

Which one is it??

--Johnny 0 18:58, 30 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd venture that both conditions could cause this sound. --Kaze0010 03:44, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Better links?
I really fail to see the relationship between the Blue Screen of Death and Ping of Death to the Click of Death. Just because they have "of Death" at the end doesn't actually imply a relationship. Especially considering that Click of Death is essentially a hardware issue while BSOD is, well, a software response (albiet sometimes to a hardware issue) and Ping of Death isn't even comparable since it's just an old networking/Internet exploit that has nothing to do with hardware (unless you count the fact that you must have a network device or a modem to actually receive the pings.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.146.0.32 (talk • contribs) 04:20, 3 May 2006


 * Agreed, and the Zip of Death is similar to the PoD. They're all software issues, which don't belong on a page about hardware failures. Any opposition to removing those links? Kanhef (talk) 03:22, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

wrong internal link
"when a hard disk has a hard error or servo failure"

The link for Servo takes me to a disambiguation page. It should be changed to go directly to the correct article, but I don't know which one it should be. Does it refer to Servomechanism or Servo drive?

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.49.165.209 (talk • contribs) 03:37, 22 July 2006

Zip drive disection
Back when the Zip click of death was still being blown off by Iomega, there was a website that showed a Zip drive taken apart and it also showed that an external magnetic field, even a fairly weak one from something like a poorly shielded CRT monitor, could cause the linear head servo of the drive, causing enough misalgnment for it to miss the tracking.

The site was later updated with info on a revised version of the Zip drive. When taken apart, it was discovered to have much larger magnets in the head servo and magnetic fields that would cause the original drives to malfunction didn't bother the revised version.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.136.145.196 (talk • contribs) 06:27, 11 September 2006

Origin of the term
I do not believe the "click of death" term originated with Iomega's Zip drives. This was a common failure in desktop 3.5" HDDs, and although I do not hve empirical evidence of this, rest assured that anyone who was involved in technical work with computers in the 1990s could attest to this.
 * The ZIP drives were introduced in 1994 with the current earliest reference to "Click of Death" (COD) in ZIP drives of May 1998. Any reliable source for the usage of the term COD in other than ZIP drives prior to May 1998 would be interesting and any prior to 1994 would be dispositive; in the absence the article should remain unchanged.  FWIW my first recollection of COD as a term of art in the disk storage industry was ZIP.  Tom94022 (talk) 18:44, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Possible cause and cure
The click can also be heard on underpowered hard disks. Since high power consumption is very short in duration, during movement of the head, current is being drawn from a capacitor. Capacitors often dries out and their capacitance falls. Thus the peak current to move the head can not be achieved. This problem can be solved by replacing the capacitors or by connecting the disk to a stronger power supply. David Jonsson 10:51, 31 October 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidjonsson (talk • contribs)

The Click of Death Virus
I read somewhere (I think it was PC Magazine sometime in the late 1990s) that the Click of Death problem in the Iomega Zip drive was contagious via this chain of events:
 * 1) A disk would be inserted into a drive with a damaged or badly misaligned head.  When the drive attempts to read the disk, it hits the edge of the disk and warps and/or shreds it.
 * 2) Suspecting a problem with the drive and that the disk might be okay, the user would try the now badly damaged disk in a known good drive.
 * 3) On attempting to read the damaged disk, the good head would hit the warped/shredded edge of the disk while crossing to the disk's interior, and that was the end of the "good" drive.

I honestly believe that the problems with the Zip drive were the main reason why the 1.44MB floppy disk persisted until 2004, when USB thumb drives finally killed it. Featherwinglove (talk) 06:24, 13 February 2014 (UTC)


 * This "virus" is mentioned in the article and according to the article apparently led Iomega to place a warning label on their cartridges. Tom94022 (talk) 18:35, 13 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I noticed that just a bit later. I was hoping more for a conversation about whether this problem, specifically or generally, extended the 3.5" floppy disk's life so far into its obsolescence that I still have two drives in my house... 216.197.154.241 (talk) 20:34, 13 February 2014 (UTC)


 * FWIW, IMO there was no way the ZIP drive was going to replace the FDD in the mass market due to the price to an OEM System Manufacturer of a ZIP drive versus the price of a FDD. OEMs did not make either in the 1990s, so an OEM was faced with buying a commodity FDD from multiple suppliers versus a proprietary from Iomega, with a price difference of maybe $40 which adds up when an OEM System Product Manager is thinking in terms of millions of systems. The OEM price of FDDs and CDD/DVDDs was and/or is way under $10 - which is one reason why CDDs replaced FDDs; for several reasons there is no way Iomega could come close to the price of an FDD or later a CDD.  Tom94022 (talk) 00:59, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Click of death. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20110906141825/http://www.pcworld.com:80/article/9378/the_click_of_death_ate_my_data.html to http://www.pcworld.com/article/9378/the_click_of_death_ate_my_data.html

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Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 03:45, 18 October 2015 (UTC)