Click of death

If the head fails to move as expected or upon moving cannot track the disk surface correctly, the disk controller may attempt to recover from the error by returning the head to its home position and then retrying, at times causing an audible "click".

The phrase "click of death" originated to describe a failure mode of the Iomega ZIP drives, appearing in print as early as January 30, 1998.

[2] In his podcast of September 18, 2008, Mac journalist Tim Robertson claimed to have coined the phrase in the early 1990s.

Iomega stated that fewer than 1 in 200 Jaz and Zip drive owners were affected by the click of death.

On a hard disk drive, 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.