History (1999): Iomega Sued Over “Click of the Death” on Zip

Until now, only a Web site voiced the various grievances of users over the infamous ‘Click of Death’ on Iomega’s Zip drives.

Now, 5 individuals in USA who purchased the drive, along with 4 law firms representing the class, are suing the company before the Superior Court of New Castle County, DE.

They allege that “the defect is caused by, inter alia, neodymium/iron magnet particles which corrupt the ability to store and retrieve data on a disk. These particles also render any disk utilized in such drives unusable. Further, the lubricant in disks can also decompose, forming a solid matter which can accumulate on the heads of the drive and prevent them from reading information, meanwhile corrupting the source disk. The mechanism of the drive heads can also slip on the edge of a disk, tearing the storage media, rendering the disk useless, and dislodging the drive heads.”

Iomega is not taking this lying down, and has always maintained that it has had complaints about the clicking from less than one half of 1% of its customers.

Misfortunes seldom arrive singly, and Iomega also agreed to pay $900,000 in penalties to settle charges for violating consumer protection rules, according to the US Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC.

The FTC stipulated that Iomega failed to offer consumers the option to agree to a delay or a refund when it could not fill orders.

The firm recently reached milestones of 20 million Zip 100MB drives and 125 million Zip disks shipped worldwide.

The new 250MB unit has been available to US customers since mid-December.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 132 on January 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.