What Is the Death Drive?

Death Tick ^[1] is a term (sometimes written as a death tick or death click ) that refers to a click when a disk storage system experiences a failure, which is usually a catastrophic failure of a storage device. ^[2]

The phrase "click of death" originated from a failure mode describing IomegaZip Drive, and first appeared on January 30, 1998. ^[3]

Iomega Zip drives are prone to head misalignment problems. ^[4]

On a hard disk, a dead tick refers to a similar phenomenon; when a drive repeatedly tries to recover from one or more errors, the head actuator may click or knock. These sounds can be heard when the head is loaded or unloaded, or they can be significant sounds stopped by the impact of the actuator, or both. A dead tick may indicate that the hard drive has failed or crashed.