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It’s a story retold amongst computer geeks of all ages. Your mechanical hard drive spins up as usual, but instead of the comforting hum you expect, you hear that telltale “click, click, click.” This is the “click of death.”
A Strange Origin
While the click of death is associated with mechanical hard drives by most people, its origin is actually from a different technology: Iomega Zip and Jaz drives. These cartridge-based removable storage devices offered oodles of space at a time when writable CD or DVD drives or external hard drives weren’t a thing. Some models developed a catastrophic fault with a loud clicking as the main symptom.
The click of death lives on today as the first symptom of a drive that shouldn’t be making any long-term plans. Once that death clock starts ticking, the prognosis is grim. The sound you’re hearing is the read-write arm repeatedly resetting back to its initial position as the drive tries and fails to read…
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