Click of death is a term that had become common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in
disk storage
Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
systems that signals a disk drive has
failed, often
catastrophically.
The clicking sound itself arises from the unexpected movement of the disk's
read/write actuator. At startup, and during use, the disk head must move correctly and be able to confirm that it is correctly tracking data on the disk. If the head fails to move as expected or upon moving cannot track the disk surface correctly, the
disk controller
{{unreferenced, date=May 2010
The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
may attempt to recover from the error by returning the head to its home position and then retrying, at times causing an audible "click". In some devices, the process automatically retries, causing a repeated or rhythmic clicking sound, sometimes accompanied by the whirring sound of the drive plate spinning.
Origin of the term
The phrase "click of death" originated to describe a failure mode of the
Iomega
Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy ...
ZIP drive
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 ...
s, appearing in print as early as January 30, 1998.
In his podcast of September 18, 2008,
Mac journalist Tim Robertson claimed to have coined the phrase in the early 1990s.
Iomega Zip drives
Iomega Zip
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 25 ...
drives were prone to developing misaligned heads.
Iomega received thousands of complaints about the click of death. Iomega stated that fewer than 1 in 200 Jaz and Zip drive owners were affected by the click of death.
A
class-action suit
A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class action ...
(''Rinaldi v. Iomega Corp.'', 41 U.C.C. Rep. Serv. 2d 1143) was filed against them for violation of the Delaware Consumer Fraud Act in September 1998.
Hard disk drives
On a
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
, the ''click of death'' refers to a similar failure mode; the head actuator may click or knock as the drive repetitively tries to recover from one or more errors. These sounds can be heard as the heads load or unload, or they can be the sounds of the actuator striking a stop, or both.
See also
*
Head crash
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
Comprehensive account of the click of death at grc.comCollection of noises made by failing hard drives at datacent.comZip Disk Click of Death at youtube.com
Rotating disc computer storage media
Technological failures