The click was always a recoil. The Zip drive's heads would extract themselves from the cartridge, retract into the body of the drive, then return, then extract again, in a small mechanical loop that produced the characteristic metallic clack roughly twice a second. Each click was the drive trying to reset its head positioning after failing to read whatever it had just been asked to find. From outside the case it sounded vaguely like a bird trapped in a wall.

Iomega launched the Zip drive at COMDEX in 1994 and shipped it the following year. A hundred megabytes for two hundred dollars, in a cartridge slightly thicker than a 3.5-inch floppy, at a moment when the standard floppy still topped out at 1.44 MB. For three or four years it was the obvious answer to the question of how to move a graphic-design project, an undergraduate thesis, or a corporate quarterly between machines. The drives appeared in offices, in studios, in bedrooms running early DTP software. Then the clicking started.

In January 1998 the phrase "click of death" appeared in print, attached to Iomega's drives, and by September that year a class action had been filed in Delaware under the state's Consumer Fraud Act. Iomega's public response was a number: fewer than half of one per cent of users were affected. The figure was repeated in interviews, on the company's website, in the boilerplate that Macworld used when it covered the dispute. The implication was containment.

What the number left out was the contagion. A Zip cartridge that had been written to by a damaged drive carried the misalignment forward, in the form of corrupted servo data that the next clean drive would then attempt to follow. The clean drive would mis-track. The miscalibration would propagate. A single sick unit could pass the failure to a chain of replacements, which is why people in the late 1990s began keeping their healthy drives away from disks of unknown provenance the way librarians keep moths away from textile collections. Steve Gibson at GRC kept a public FAQ documenting the mechanism, and the term spread far enough that within a few years it had stopped meaning Zip drives specifically and started meaning any disk failure that announced itself audibly.

The lawsuit eventually settled around a packaging disclaimer. Sales fell as CD-R undercut the cost-per-megabyte. By 2003 Iomega had stopped selling Zips in any meaningful quantity. The company tried a CD-burner brand using the Zip name and a tiny sub-floppy called Clik!, neither survived. PC World later listed the Zip drive as both the fifteenth worst technology product of all time and, in a different list, the twenty-third best, which is the only honest summary anyone produced.

The strange afterlife is in aviation. Jeppesen distributed navigation database updates on Zip disks into 2014. Universal Avionics took TAWS uploads from them at the same date. Pilots in regional fleets were carrying 100 MB cartridges into cockpits twenty years after the click of death entered print, because the certification cost of changing a flight-management input is high enough to outlast a generation of consumer storage.

The haunting, though, sits with the people who lost a project to one. They learned, before their twenties were out, that physical removable media could betray you silently, and could spread the betrayal to whatever you tried to use as a backup. A whole cohort now treats anything that is not duplicated to a second cloud as already lost. The cloud-first reflex has many causes. One of them clicks twice a second, in a beige plastic case, somewhere in the second half of the 1990s.

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