3 ms·

damn those iomega jaz & zip drives bring back memories...thanks for sharing

• samstave 9y ago
  Heh, I’ve left quite a number of Jaz and Zip drives at weirdstuff!
• colordrops 9y ago
  bad memories... they were never reliable for me. click of death etc
  • codazoda 9y ago
    The zip drive failure rate was less than 1% and the "click of death" had hundreds of causes in the percentage that failed. You see, the Zip drive had a parked head. When the head came out to read the disk it would "click" as the head left it's dock and came out to the media. If it failed to read the media it would click again as it re-docked. This all happened fairly quickly and was the "click-click" sound you heard when a drive failed for almost any reason. That proved to be a very difficult problem that ultimately led to the class action suit that I believe was the companies demise. It survived in name for a number of years, but really only in name. The lawsuit itself didn't seem to affect the company that much but it affected policy a lot. Their next drive could have been the next big craze. It was ready way before compact flash came along but the company refused to ship it because the failure rate was slightly above 1%. We spent a few years trying to reduce the failure rate by fractions and we all know that a few years is ages is technology.
    • colordrops 9y ago
      Both my friend and I had drives with the click of death problem. It could be a 1 in 10,000 event, or it could be that the rate was higher than 1%. I remember it being a very common problem at the time.
• codazoda 9y ago
  I worked in support there during the Zip drive boom. My first tech job and it was a wild few years.