#WD MY PASSPORT FOR MAC CLICKING SOUND ZIP#

Replacement drives had a warning about damaged ZIP cartridges on a peel-off label and quick visual inspection instructions.Ī lifetime warranty on the 100 MB cartridge was misleading as to the actual cartridge life, and future products like the 250 MB offerings carry a 5-year or less warranty from Iomega. A previously good drive would click as if a mis-written cartridge had been inserted. The damaged disks could go on to damage the heads of any other drive they were used in. In rare cases, a Zip cartridge with disk edge damage could rip off the heads in a Zip drive. This omission was discovered by the drive's original designers and the washer was put back into the design, and new Zip drives did not experience this click of death. Zip drives that followed for a several month period exhibited the click of death. A cost reduction effort within Iomega manufacturing decided that to reduce cost, they would remove this part. To protect from this damage, the drive designers placed a small doughnut-shaped foam washer at the end of the thin steel bearing the actuator slid on. This violent stopping of the actuator could damage the fragile suspension system of the read/write head.

When the actuator was removed in this manner, it slammed to a stop at the end of its travel. This was to prevent damage by the heads being left on the media. If the drive had its power removed inadvertently by being unplugged or power outage, the read/write heads were pulled off the disk by a power-loss circuit. Under normal drive use, the actuator was under the servo control of the drive. This actuator slid back and forth on a single thin steel rod using two sleeve bearings. The Zip drive had a very low-cost and revolutionary linear actuator to move the read/write head back and forth on the Zip disk media. Parking and relaunching continued until the data had been read or a set number of attempts had been reached. This happens each time a data request fails: the drive parks the heads and then relaunches them. As part of the drive's retry program, the controller would quickly snap the head arm back into the drive and out again, producing a specific number of 'clicks'. With a malfunctioning drive or cartridge, the drive heads tried to read the Zip disk, but could not find a good Z track or hit a bad spot during a read operation.

If all four redundant 'Z tracks' were lost, the cartridge was unusable, since retail drives are unable to low-level format the disks. The Zip cartridges also wore out, grew defects, or otherwise lost all four 'Z tracks'. The heads caused the data on the cartridge to become misaligned, rendering it unreadable. Magnetic fields could also cause the drive heads to become misaligned, as the drives were not internally shielded from external magnetic fields. Dust inside the Zip disks or dirty heads caused by oxide build-up could misalign the heads, but in newer devices it was due to poor quality control and manufacturing defects in the drive itself. Iomega Zip drives were prone to developing misaligned heads. ( February 2008) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to improve this section by introducing more precise citations. This section includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations.

Wd my passport for mac clicking sound