You Used to Be Able to Hold Your Entire Life on One Disk
Picture this: 1995. You're standing in a CompUSA, staring at a wall of beige peripherals, and a store employee hands you something that looks like a chunky floppy disk on steroids. "A hundred megabytes," he says, like he's letting you in on a secret. A hundred megabytes. On a single removable disk. For context, a standard floppy held 1.44 megabytes. This thing held almost seventy times that. You could fit entire folders of Word documents, a few small programs, maybe even a handful of MP3s if you were already on that wave. It cost $199 for the drive and about $20 per disk, and it felt like the future had just shown up at your local electronics store.
The Iomega Zip drive launched in March 1995, and it didn't just sell well. It sold out. First day. Gone. Every unit. The thing moved so fast that Iomega, a company that had been struggling in the early '90s with a stock price hovering around $2 a share, suddenly couldn't manufacture enough of them. And the press went wild. Every computer magazine on the shelf was running reviews, and every review said basically the same thing: this changes everything.
They weren't wrong. Not yet, anyway.
From Two Bucks to Seven Billion
Here's where the Iomega story gets genuinely insane. Before the Zip drive, this was a company on life support. Founded in 1980 in Roy, Utah, Iomega had been making Bernoulli drives, which were removable storage devices that cost thousands of dollars and never really caught on outside of professional settings. The original Bernoulli drive ran about $2,700. That's not a typo. The company had talent and technology, but no product that regular people could afford or wanted to buy.
Then the Zip drive happened, and everything changed overnight. Revenue hit $362 million in 1995, the Zip drive's launch year. Then it exploded to $1.2 billion in 1996. Let that sink in. They more than tripled revenue in a single year. The stock price experienced a 2,135% surge by 1996, rocketing from around $2 to well over $100 per share. At its peak, Iomega was valued at nearly $7 billion. Seven. Billion. For a company that made removable storage disks.
Wall Street lost its mind. Individual investors piled in. There was a whole online community of Iomega stock boosters who called themselves "Iomegans" and traded tips on early internet message boards. This was the mid-'90s version of a meme stock, except nobody had that vocabulary yet. People were taking out loans to buy Iomega shares. Kim Edwards, the CEO who had arrived in January 1994 and greenlit the Zip drive project, was being talked about like a tech visionary.
And honestly, the product deserved a lot of the hype. If you were alive and using a computer in 1996 or 1997, you probably had a Zip drive, or you knew someone who did. Graphic designers needed them. College students needed them. Offices ran on them. The 100MB Zip disk became the default way to move large files from one computer to another, because email attachments were still tiny and burning CDs required expensive equipment. Iomega eventually released 250MB and 750MB versions, but the original 100MB drive was the one that mattered. That was the one that changed the game.
The Sound Nobody Wanted to Hear
And then people started hearing it. A rhythmic clicking noise coming from their Zip drives. Click. Click. Click. Not the normal sounds of a drive reading a disk. Something else. Something mechanical and wrong.
They called it the Click of Death, and it became one of the most infamous hardware defects in personal computing history. Here's what was happening: the read/write heads inside the Zip drive were becoming misaligned. When that happened, the heads would bounce off their end stops, producing that distinctive clicking sound. A misaligned drive couldn't read your disk properly. But here's the really nasty part: a bad drive could actually damage a good disk. And then that damaged disk could go on to misalign the heads in the next drive you put it in. It was a chain reaction. A contagious hardware failure.
The technical root cause was almost painfully preventable. Inside earlier Zip drives, there was a small doughnut-shaped foam washer at the end of the thin steel bearing that the actuator arm slid on. This washer acted as a cushion, protecting the heads from slamming into the end stops. At some point during manufacturing, someone at Iomega decided to cut costs by removing this part. It was a tiny component. Probably saved pennies per unit. And it eventually helped destroy the company.
Dust was also a factor. Zip disks weren't sealed like hard drives. Tiny particles could get inside and cause the heads to misalign. Magnetic fields from nearby speakers or monitors could do it too, since the drives lacked internal shielding. But the removed foam washer was the big one. That was the decision that turned a normal engineering vulnerability into a widespread catastrophe.
The Internet Turns Against Iomega
Now, this was the late '90s, and the internet was just becoming a place where angry consumers could organize. A guy named Steve Gibson, who ran a website called Gibson Research Corporation, became the unofficial chronicler of the Click of Death. He set up a dedicated page documenting the problem, collecting user reports, and publishing technical analysis of what was going wrong inside the drives. His site became a rallying point for frustrated Zip drive owners who felt like Iomega was ignoring the problem.
And Iomega was, for a while, ignoring the problem. Or at least downplaying it. The company's official position was that the Click of Death affected only a small percentage of drives. They offered replacement drives under warranty but didn't acknowledge any systemic defect. For users who had lost important data, irreplaceable files, college theses, graphic design work, family photos that existed nowhere else, "a small percentage" wasn't much comfort.
The frustration built. Message boards lit up. Gibson's site got millions of hits. And in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega in federal court, alleging violations of the Delaware Consumer Fraud Act and claiming that the company had known about the defect and failed to warn consumers.
The case was settled in March 2001. The settlement wasn't exactly a windfall for affected users. Iomega agreed to provide a free 24/7 troubleshooting hotline and offered rebates of up to $40 on future Iomega products. If your Zip drive ate your thesis, you got a coupon. That was the deal.
The World Moved On Without Them
Even without the Click of Death, Iomega was running into a wall. The same year the Zip drive launched, CD-R drives were starting to drop in price. By 1998, CD-RW drives, the ones that could burn rewritable CDs, were becoming affordable for regular consumers. A blank CD-R held 650 to 700 megabytes, cost well under a dollar, and worked in any CD-ROM drive. The Zip disk held 100MB and cost $10 to $15. The math stopped working pretty quickly.
Then USB flash drives showed up around 2000 and 2001, and it was over. Smaller, faster, no moving parts, no special drive required, just plug it into any USB port. The first commercial USB flash drives held 8MB, which wasn't much, but by 2003 you could get a 256MB drive for about $50. By 2005, 1GB drives were common and cheap. The Zip drive's entire reason for existing had been replaced by something that fit on your keychain.
Iomega tried to adapt. They released the Zip 250 in 1999 and the Zip 750 in 2002. They branched into network-attached storage and external hard drives under the "Rev" brand. None of it recaptured the magic. The stock price that had peaked above $100 fell to around $1 per share by the early 2000s. The company that had been worth $7 billion was now worth almost nothing.
In April 2008, EMC Corporation, one of the biggest names in enterprise storage, announced it would acquire Iomega for $213 million. For a company that had once been valued at $7 billion, $213 million felt like a clearance sale. EMC eventually folded the Iomega brand into its LenovoEMC joint venture, and by 2013 the name was essentially gone.
Why the Zip Drive Still Matters
I still have a Zip drive in a box in my closet. An external USB model, translucent blue, from around 1999. I don't have anything to put in it. I don't have any Zip disks anymore. But I can't bring myself to throw it away, because holding it takes me back to a very specific moment in computing history when portable storage felt exciting. When you could hand someone a disk and say, "everything's on there," and it actually meant something.
The Zip drive's story is really a story about timing. Iomega found a gap in the market, a brief window between the floppy disk's decline and the arrival of cheap CD burning and USB storage, and they drove a truck through it. For about three years, they owned that gap completely. They made a product that people genuinely needed and genuinely loved. And then they let a cost-cutting manufacturing decision undermine consumer trust at the exact moment when the technology landscape was shifting under their feet.
The Click of Death didn't kill Iomega by itself. CD-RW drives and USB flash drives would have eventually made the Zip drive obsolete no matter what. But the defect accelerated the decline, poisoned the brand at its most vulnerable moment, and turned what could have been a graceful transition into a collapse. Iomega had the chance to become a major storage company, to evolve alongside the technology. Instead, they became a cautionary tale about what happens when you cut the wrong corner.
If you ever owned a Zip drive, you remember two things: how cool it felt to carry 100MB in your pocket, and the fear of hearing that click.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Iomega Zip drive come out?
The Zip drive launched in March 1995 with a retail price of $199 for the drive and approximately $20 per 100MB disk. It sold out on its first day.
What was the Click of Death?
The Click of Death was a well-documented hardware defect in Zip drives where the read/write heads became misaligned, producing a distinctive clicking noise. A defective drive could damage disks, and those damaged disks could then damage other drives, creating a chain reaction of failures.
Why did Zip drives fail?
Zip drives declined due to a combination of the Click of Death defect, which eroded consumer trust, and competition from cheaper, higher-capacity alternatives like CD-RW drives and USB flash drives that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
What happened to Iomega as a company?
After its stock price fell from over $100 to around $1 per share, Iomega was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008 for $213 million. The brand was eventually folded into EMC's product line and discontinued.
How much could a Zip disk hold?
The original Zip disk held 100MB. Later versions included 250MB (released 1999) and 750MB (released 2002) capacities, though neither achieved the same market success as the original.