Testing and benchmarking the micro-floppy "iomega clik!"

[@robertmitschke6312]

Get well soon Adrian.

[@manxam2k]

Get well, get well soon, we want you to get well... ♪♫

[@BenHeckHacks]

ZIP might seem like a joke now, but as a graphic artist in the 90's they were DUH BOMB! Remember that's back when a blank CD-R disc costs $20.... each!

[@youtubasoarus]

Yup, I have fond memories of Zip disks.

[@_nemo171]

I remember the 'clicks of death'. I've heard 2. :)

[@the_beefy1986]

Rewritability was a HUGE advantage. CDRW was a joke of a format (and there were several formats). As a kid, Zip drives were essential for me to be able to copy around games once they got larger than 1 or 2 floppies.

[@williamtopping]

And the price of the writers.... Thousands...

[@andydvsn]

Delivered all my master layout files to printers on Zip disk back in the day. Loved them, they meant a job was done!

[@FooneTuring]

A fun thing about their USB pocketzip drives: they're just the PCMCIA drives inside a holder. I don't think they even have any smarts, they just connect to some built in USB support on the PCMCIA card

[@AtreidaeChibiko]

Gosh I remember this, I had a little external clik drive that came with an SD Card reader so you could dump photos off an SD and ontop Clik disks. I wonder if it was the same.

[@kakurerud7516]

some CF cards did this too, was not popular because the usb reader would not recognize normal CF cards

[@qwertymesa]

Foone…

[@HappyQuailsLC]

I never thought of PCMCIAs as being USB storage before... or else it has just been so many years that I just forgpt about it.

[@HappyQuailsLC]

The external zip drives' i/o was serial

[@monolithicshapes5215]

I hope you feel better Adrian. We are all worried about you.

[@nitehawk86]

The late 90's were an insane time for tech growth. Iomega went from a huge entity in the industry to forgoten in the span of a few years.

[@kaseyboles30]

At the time of the zip drive I was rooting for the LS120. It supported 120MB on special floppies, but ALSO did regular microfloppies as well. So even when IOMEGA caught up (they had 40mb when ls120's came out and 80mb's very soon after and eventually got to 100 and 200mb iirc) you still needed a second drive for floppies with Iomega, but not ls120. The folk behind the ls120 did have a higher capacity (240mb IIRC) version they never got to release because IOMEGA out advertised them and put them out of business. I could swear I saw a prototype or unshipped unit of the larger LS drive on some retro channel a few years ago.

[@Toonrick12]

@@kaseyboles30 Actually, the Iomega Zip disk came out before the LS120, by a factor of a few years. if the LS120 came out at the same time as Zip (around 94, IIRC) then sure, it could of been super successful.

[@kaseyboles30]

@@Toonrick12 True I had forgotten. Also misremembered the fate of it's successor the ls240, which actual did ship for a while before it went away.

[@LatitudeSky]

Worked for a company in 98 to 2000 where we had to support Zip, Jazz, Syquest, giant data tapes, LS120 and more. While working for that company, I got sent to Microcenter to buy a CD burner. It was $600. For just the burner. It required a SCSI controller card. Just as I left that place, we saw the first USB thumb drives arrive.

[@IAmScorchio]

@@LatitudeSky I used a Kodak CD burner in 94/95, which was a large external unit about the size of a desktop pc and connected by SCSI. We literally had to tiptoe around that thing while it was writing to the CD, otherwise it would screw up. And at over £10 for a "cheap" CD, you really didn't want it to screw up. It's crazy how quickly it all changed.

[@TheDarkOne2217]

Love the videos Adrian hope you fully recover soon

[@Beltlinerailworks]

I can't believe I'm watching this. I worked tech support for iomega products back in Buffalo NY when Softbank had the contract - these drives were the bane of my existence. They had a failure rate that even exceeded the Jaz drives. I'm shocked that you actually found one that worked!

[@runderwo]

The Linux driver is called ide-floppy and Clik is still supported in recent kernels (based on work originally done out-of-tree for the 2.2 series).

[@Dutch-linux]

on the latest arch distro's that driver should be built in the kernel and even in mint it should be built in

[@Electronics-Rocks]

Don't you have to initialise it & mount the drive as it registers as removable against HD in Linux?

[@runderwo]

@@Electronics-Rocks yes, but it appears the block device was not even registered. That would be a prerequisite.

[@seshpenguin]

@@Electronics-Rocks You'll see the mass storage device node created in dmesg though, even if it's not formatted or mounted

[@Electronics-Rocks]

CDROM so cheap to be consumables & CDRW drives dropping in price quickly of these drives killed all other options due to ease of use in more machines.

[@fattomandeibu]

I think what killed Clik is the £100 CD-RW drive and 30 pence CD-Rs, at least for folks moving or backing up large amounts of data in the home. Memory cards for phones and cameras, then later for computers with USB sticks taking over from DVD-Rs. USB sticks had been around for years before they finally took off as flash memory prices dropped. Happened in tandem, but at a faster rate, with SSDs taking over from mechanical hard disks.

[@tychothefriendlymonolith]

200 generic CD-Rs in shrinkwrapped plastic for £20 at ESCOM. Halcyon days.

[@LOLMAN9538]

And then the iPod came along in 2001 with it's beefy hard drive and it pretty much killed off whatever market the Clik drive had left. iOmega saw this and promptly put the kibosh on both the Clik drive and the similarly branded Zip drive, canceling plans for a 100MB Zip disk and promptly leaving the format behind in 2003. Surprisingly, though, iOmega continued to stick around for many years after this, providing highly capable NAS solutions for businesses and IT professionals. It would be acquired by EMC in 2008, and rebranded as LenovoEMC in 2012 after EMC's acquisition by Lenovo, before it, and the iOmega name alongside it, were finally discontinued by Lenovo in 2018.

[@tim1724]

PCMCIA/PC Card: 16-bit ISA CardBus: 32-bit PCI (also has a 16-bit ISA bridge to support old cards) ExpressCard: PCIe/USB (ExpressCard 1.0 supplies PCIe1 x1 and USB2, ExpressCard 2.0 supplies PCIe2 x1 and USB 3, although I don't think anything ever really supported ExpressCard 2.0.)

[@NoNameForNone]

I distinctly remember my T430 doing well over PCIe1 speeds, which did not have a EC2 slot but I guess they just routed one of the lanes from the CPU and it negotiates whatever it likes (card was a bridge card to a external full size pcie slot). Might also be just memory doing funny things.

[@Stedmiel]

afaik thinkpad p50 has pcie3 on expresscard slot.

[@Stoney3K]

There were a few breakout boxes for graphics cards that you could plug into the Expresscard. I still have one that turns it into a 4-lane Gen2.0 PCIe slot, for plugging in your laptop at your home base.

[@marcinmiklaszewski9336]

I'd try setting "dma if available" and checking if actually dma is enabled in XP. It could get faster but CPU wouldn't be used as much. XP does it without a reboot. Win 2k needed a reboot for it. I can remember that as if it was yesterday. Recover quickly!

[@rockapartie]

Yeah, why didn't he enable it?

[@reviewaccount469]

Had one of these click drives with my first tablet computer around 2000. Way cheaper than CF drives at the time.

[@MatthewHill]

I remember Microdrives, and Click drives. I even owned a few, back in the day. The great thing about Microdrives was--if you dropped one, you didn't have to bother bending down to pick it up.

[@AsherJohnson-k1i]

Wdym

[@frenchshark2000]

I like your explanation about ATA being a subset of the ISA bus, perfectly true ! To go one step further PCMCIA is an ISA bus on a different form factor. It is technically possible to connect an ISA card to an A600 or A1200 by adding a converter card. A picogus for Amiga maybe ?

[@davidschaper3238]

PCMCIA doesn't have (ISA) DMA.

[@Stoney3K]

​@@davidschaper3238 So PCMCIA was programmed I/O only?

[@tomaszlukaszewski]

Linux driver for that kind of device is called pata_pcmcia and for some reason it is not loaded automatically. Calling "sudo modprobe pata_pcmcia" might help.

[@alexcrouse]

This, and mine could never hot plug the drive. You could swap discs, but it the card had to be in the slot during boot for me!

[@ScottGrammer]

Man, I remember these things. Never owned a clik, but I owned a zip drive. Feel better, Adrian. Drink water!

[@BillAnt]

I skipped the Zip drive and went with a JAZ drive with 1Gb cartridges. Unfortunately all of my 10 disk died by the dreaded click-click sound. lol

[@lilsammywasapunkrock]

I had several zip, jazz and click discs. The click drive was my favorite because it was fun to play with as a kid. From what I understand, iomega was looking to find a smaller firm factor since they couldn't really fit zip drives in most laptops. We had a ton of external devices, including the big giant parallel and serial port external cdrom drives.

[@Artemis22202]

Nice find Adrian! I was in IT in the nineties and early 2000's I remember how every day there was something new to buy! It was an incredible time for computer technology! I remember the first Pentium processors and the release of windows 95 , the industry was so fast paced and amazingly fun. It was a very special time!

[@no0ne.]

The LPC soundcard adapter is called dISAppointment by Rasteri

[@Intelwinsbigly]

I wish I could just run a floppy disc controller natively in windows

[@W62315]

Love that you're still getting good use out of that Thinkpad x61!

[@pseudocoder78]

As a teenager I had one of the 100 MB drives and some disks for it back in the mid 90's. Used it to back up all my floppy disks on the family's 386SX. That was pretty cool, but I had to keep the floppies around because I was affected by the click of death on some of the disks. Never saw a dime in compensation either. I learned some pretty valuable lessons about media failure and backup strategies in my young years due to iomega.

[@ncot_tech]

It's amazing how people can make complex moving parts so small when their company's existence depends on it. I wonder how many ex watchmakers were employed by Iomega in the 90s?

[@volvo09]

I have a few ibm microdrive 1" hard drives and they are equally amazing, truly mechanical watch levels of shrinking parts down.

[@JL-hy7ve]

Adrian, I had covid a few weeks ago. I feel your pain. I did not feel normal for a least a week afterwards. Wish you the best for a speedy return to normal.

[@Midcon77]

Thanks for fighting through Adrian!

[@nathanahubbard1975]

I had an LS-120 drive around this time, like late 1998 or so. It worked pretty well and was obviously the same size as a normal floppy drive and floppy disk. But just like this thing, it was a bit too late. We had CDs already.

[@gorak9000]

The thing with a zip drive was you could take it with you, and plug it into any machine with a parallel port. No one (I knew) had a LS120 drive, and being an internal drive, it wasn't really portable, and because no one else had one, they seemed less useful to me

[@nathanahubbard1975]

​@@gorak9000 Well, I never claimed they were particularly successful. Really, all of those drives from that era were kind of a failure. Again, we had CDs that held way more data, and everyone had one of those. None of them really replaced the floppy, even if the LS-120 tried to be compatible. Eventually thumb drives and the internet took over.

[@gorak9000]

@@nathanahubbard1975 I used a parallel port zip drive to download stuff from the internet at school, and take it home. Both the school and I didn't have a cd burner (or maybe there was one, on one computer in the library). But I was able to get them to install the zip drive drivers into the network image so I could plug my zip drive into any machine (or maybe the drivers worked by running it as a regular user? don't remember now). For 2 or 3 years, it was how I got stuff from the internet to home and it was amazing. I used to carry the zip drive and a few disks in a lunch bag, and could just plug it in and access my stuff. Once I got the internet at home, I was doing what today would be called "cloud storage" almost immediately, and able to access my stuff from anywhere, so I was actually very late to get any USB sticks! Like years and and years after they came out. I didn't see the point of them, when with the internet, you had all your stuff everywhere anyway. Even today I don't have many USB sticks, and the ones I do have are mostly for booting OS install images.

[@georgH]

I remember reading about these back in the day, never seen one. That's really cool! Anyway, hope you get better, it took me 2.5 months to fully recover from it!

[@KennethScharf]

I'm FINALLY getting over what was probably just a bad cold mixed with hayfever. Was coughing like crazy, had postnasal drip, and sometimes a mild fever. Lasted for about 45 days! BUT I did test negative for Covid and Strep. Also had laryingitis. Glad you're feeling better, I wonder why a lack of videos for a week or so!

[@Retroguyuk75]

Get better soon Adrian, love your t-shirt it's cool. Great video as always :)...

[@kjamison5951]

Be well, Adrian. Do what makes you feel happy. That’s the best way to help recovery.

[@thcoura]

You have to admire such a small mechanical precision thing holding your data

[@youtubasoarus]

I've always wanted one of those! So cool!

[@Tyler-dn8wn]

Great video! Get better soon! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

[@ashfalfuady4515]

Get well soon, we love your channel

[@Choralone422]

Hope you're back to 100% soon Adrian! Back in my laptop repair depot days of the late 90s through the 2010s I never encountered an Iomega Click or PocketZip drive that worked properly. Granted they came in on laptops that needed repairs but none of the PCMCIA drives I encountered ever worked properly for one reason or another. IBM Microdrives on the other hand seemed to work great back then but were fairly expensive and faded out fairly quickly.

[@krz8888888]

That name was so funny back then in the context of the clicking zip drives self destroying

[@volvo09]

Back in the day I only learned about the click of death by searching the internet for "iomega click" after seeing this drive and not realizing iomega spelled it "clic" and not click... I never had a zip drive, but I still read the web page going over all the problems and reading responses from affected users.

[@LatitudeSky]

Worked for a service bureau during 1999-2000. We had to accept all the portable drives, from Jazz to LS120 to Zip, you name it. What killed all them for us was NOT USB thumb drives. It was recordable CDs, because the burners became somewhat affordable and the discs were a dollar at worst. And they could be read in most CD drives so you didn't need to worry if the recipient could read it. Usually they could. Yes CDs were smaller but the media got down to 20 cents a pop, maybe less. And the discs were durable enough. Or at least not fragile. It became FAR easier to just go CD recordable for everything. We had rewrite discs as well. By 2001, all of the Iomega stuff was gone. We had very little work on thumb drives until 2005 or so. CD recordable gave way to DVD recordable and that held on for a long, long time.

[@slvclw]

Hey buddy I used to work for Iomega. It was hilarious when people would call on those since the name came out after the click of death. Our theory was that they called it the click to rebrand the word click. I never got one but they gave a Zip drive I never used it and gave that away to goodwill!

[@questionablecommands9423]

6:50 I had a "PocketZip Clik!" (mine had the branding of both for some reason. I guess I got mine during a transition period). The silver thing you're calling the USB version is actually just a carry case. iirc, it held the pcmcia card and two disks (three if you kept one in the card). You can find the exact same clam-shell case in gift and novelty shops being sold as a wallet or business card holder.

[@volvo09]

That is really interesting! So the tooling for that case still exists and someone is still knocking them out from time to time!

[@AndrewErwin73]

I feel for you man... I had COVID three times... what was so weird was that each time it was a whole different set of symptoms, except the common ones (taste and smell)... hope you get well soon man! We need you.

[@ejonesss]

thanks for telling us you was sick because some of us was getting worried that maybe you angered some manufacturer to the point where they did copyright strikes on your videos.

[@adamburgess1287]

Had a Korg Triton keyboard with the SCSI upgrade card and a ZIP250 around 1999/2000. Was 100% reliable for me on the road. Loved it. Had a load of samples, sounds, and sequences on it. A HUGE upgrade from carrying how ever many floppies around to gigs. Then, yeah, USB became popular and here we are…!

[@eyankee01]

I have one of these, as well as an external one that is portable with a battery, and that had a compact flash card reader. I had an 8 MB card for my digital camera, and could off load those images to the click drive, and then once home, put the click drive in a dock, and access the files from my PC. I've still got several click disk, as well as a 2 pack of new disks I never opened. The picture Adrian looked at was the case for this card. as well as a holder for a second disk.

[@volvo09]

My first camera had an 8MB Smartmedia card. Storage advanced so rapidly, within a few years larger 32-128MB SD card cameras were available.

[@tramadol42]

I used a Clik40 drive on my Linux Sony 505 notebook in the early 2000s. I can only remember having to spend hours compiling the kernel to get it to run.

[@throwaway6478]

25:50 Like most things people attribute to Windows 7, it actually debuted with Vista.

[@Stoney3K]

CardBus is the (32 bit) PCI extension to PCMCIA. It wasn't used a lot since a lot of devices by that time were either built-in (e.g. Ethernet adapters) or running through USB once it was prevalent in laptops. One of the more common applications was early WiFi cards.

[@lemagreengreen]

Yeah CardBus was the thing that tripped up a lot of people trying to add WiFi to their ancient 90s laptops... it looked like 16bit PCMCIA but didn't work of course. I remember having to gently explain that there was no way of making it work to a lot of people.

[@Omegapork]

I remember the PCMCIA drive just spontaneously giving up during LGR's video... I haven't watched all of yours yet, so I hope that history doesn't repeat itself!

[@kencreten7308]

Hope you feel fully better soon, Sir. Thanks for the vid.

[@vonhapen1]

Get well soon Adrian. 🍀

[@38911bytefree]

Pretty sexy format, very futuristic, and still runs. Tipical from vintage stuff =)

[@johnmay4803]

good 2 see you back pal i hope you feel a lot better

[@808v1]

jeesh Adrian, positive vibes are coming your way from me anyways. hope you get better soon!

[@finisek123]

Get well soon Adrian! Love the videos

[@themegaman91965]

I remember when flash memory was so expensive that the 80 GB iPod had an HDD, while the flash memory Nanos were limited to ridiculously small sizes such as 2, and 4 GB. Insane how we have come from that to 1+ TB SSD internal sticks about the size of the iPod Nano itself...

[@TheGreatAtario]

Heck, you can get Micro SD cards in 1TB+ sizes

[@theol1044]

The first flash memory MP3 players had something like 32 MB memory. In comparison, the first Nanos just a few years later were HUGE.

[@_nemo171]

There are things that must be forgotten and left in the past. Love the retro stuff but Iomega is one of those I shortly remember but will forget quickly after Adrian's video. lol

[@tlhIngan]

There were CF to IDE adapters. I have one so I could plug a hard drive into a digital camera. The electronics on the CF card are used to handle the CF handshakes and configuration information. The underlying protocol once identified is still ATA, but PCMCIA (and CompactFlash, which are nearly identical save 14 address lines) use the same configuration blocks for identification and configuration (Plug and Play). There are also reverse CF to PCMCIA adapters that let you plug in a full size PC card into a CF slot.

[@tychothefriendlymonolith]

Get well soon brother.

[@TzOk]

Windows XP didn't support partitions on removable drives. There was even a special filter thing to mount removable drives as fixed disks to allow access to multiple partitions on them.

[@pawestelmach3235]

Actually, disk drives were miniaturized until 2006, when Nokia showed the N91 model with a 4GB or 8GB disk with a size of 0.85 inches

[@ruthlessadmin]

Depending on the distro & version, Linux may not auto mount removable devices. You should try the 'blkid" and/or 'lsblk' commands to see if you have a new block device after you insert it. If so, you can mount it manually. It probably isn't spinning up because it's not being mounted, but it does look like it's being detected correctly and possibly a kernel driver loaded (though I didn't look too closely at your dmesg & lspci output).

[@donkeymedic]

it may be a format issue too. Make sure you have dosfstools and mtools. sudo apt install dosfstools mtools

[@ruthlessadmin]

@@donkeymedic Very good point.

[@povilasstaniulis9484]

They would still show up in dmesg. And neither the iomega nor the CF card did.

[@electronraygun6346]

I thought you sounded a little tired. KZbin auto played this on my TV so I missed the bit where you mentioned COVID so I jumped back to the beginning. It took me several weeks to get back to some sort of normal after COVID. I really hope you feel better soon. Make sure you get as much rest as possible!

[@checksum00]

People really wanna convince they have a now-dead illness instead of just the cold.

[@S7eveThePira7e]

Hope you're feeling better. The silver thing in the Wiki articles' second photo was a case for the drive. I've still got a Palm Pilot with a similar case laying around somewhere.

[@davidellsworth4203]

Perhaps the Clik drive really can do 600 KB/s, but employs variable angular data density which would make it slower on the inner tracks. You ran the ATTO benchmark all the way up to 32 MB, meaning it would've given you the average speed, not the speed of the outermost tracks. At a 128 KB buffer size it reached 468 KB/s, so it's quite plausible that this would have been 600 KB/s if run on, say, the first 3 MB instead of 32 MB.

[@andrewphi4958]

I still love spinning media. It has some life in it :)

[@michaelstoliker971]

Sorry to hear about your medical problems. I was planning on coming out to Portland to meet my Granddaughter and got hit with heart problems so I guess we won't be meeting up. I hope you feel better soon.

[@MartinWolves]

I have minidiscs from a similar era and they still work fine.

[@saifal-badri]

I went through the same exact symptoms, terrible variant of covid. Hope you feel better soon.

[@ShaunMcCloud]

I had one of these, and the USB dock for it. Was nice in college back when I needed to bring files between computer labs and they were getting to big to fit on a single 3.5" floppy.

[@myleft9397]

Wow! Get well soon. You're allowed to take a day off! Don't be too hard on yourself...Edit after the heat: if they continued on, would they have been the "cook of death"?

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Get better soon my friend.

[@RambozoClown]

I had one back in the day. Never really got much use, but I was a sucker for any kind of storage Clik, Zip, LS120, Jazz, CDR. Doing IT work I used to carry a GIANT binder of install floppies for most of the software my customers used. Later that went to a small stack of Zip disks, then finally CDRs even though the CDR drive was $700 it didn't take long to make up for that with cheap disks. I think I might still have a Microdrive in a digital camera around here.

[@docnele]

ZIP drives were usable for a short time (mid-late 90's, before USB drives) for backup or trasfer among remote computers . It was moderately popular and actually it became available dirt cheap after click of death problem was revealed. I had a unit that went into parallel port and was usable as was cheaper then CD burners and empty CDs at that time (SE Europe) . After ZIP, Iomega should had seen the writing on the wall made by USB and CDRW and switch to sold state or hard-drive based devices because of size that was set for portable media by a CD.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Gosh, you get so lucky with Iomega drives working! I can only imagine Iomega ate into some of their price advance (vis a vis using floppy disks) by needing those ultra thin pancake motors and the sheet-metal disk construction. IBM meanwhile did IBM and made a regular old box, 2 or 3 times as thick, with a regular pancake motor. Yes lots of R&D to get the disk platter small enough, but simpler construction for everything else. Easier onboarding with all those CF readers too, versus Iomega’s special PCMCIA drive. I’m sure Clik could still have been cheaper if you needed lots of disks, but… MicroDrive was so clearly the more robust, more sensibly-engineered option for one or two. No wonder Iomega sold multi-pack bundles. But even an early MicroDrive is similar in size to a good chunk of one of those Clik bundles…

[@jdebultra]

I used to use those back in the late 90's 2000's. I used mine on Slackware but you have to mount it as I recall. I probably have some in a box somewhere.

[@neophytealpha]

intricacy of the click disc system.

[@Lopson13]

get well soon adrian!

[@succuvamp_anna]

Oh god Adrian, please get well soon!

[@1967CougarXR7]

I have the hipzip, and about 20 or so disks for it. Last I checked (about a year ago) they were all still working.

[@Dorelaxen]

I had Covid twice as well, but thankfully I was completely asymptomatic (I get quarterly blood tests done for unrelated sodium issues and they found out that way). Hope you get better soon, man!

[@rockapartie]

Sorry for being pedantic, but COVID is the name of the actual disease caused by the virus. Infection without symptoms = no COVID.

[@Artyomus78]

as to linux, for further analysis you may use: lsblk - shows all block devices, whether they are mounted or not lspcmcia - shows pcmcia devices lspci, lsusb - pci and usb devices correspondingly lsmod - shows loaded kernel modules ("drivers") pccardctl - pcmcia info/control/config utility get well soon and thank you for your videos

[@nalinux]

Interesting IDE history.

[@shanejohns7901]

For better time-line construction, it's worth noting that the extremely popular "Napster" file sharing program was shut down on July 11, 2001 -- by court order. And IIRC, you could get most songs at a tolerable quality to compress down to around 3MB give or take. Obviously the longer and better quality songs will be larger in size.

[@MrJakeTucker]

I use an old dell laptop from 2005 as a music player in my kitchen. It has the latest Debian on it. 32bit. It has a PCMCIA card in it which is a compact flash adaptor and it works. It has a 32gb CF card in it although I don't use it. I ripped out the old HDD and put in a SSD.

[@XMguy]

Well wishes. Also CableCard cards were PCMCIA.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

As I understand it (and mind you, I could be wrong), IOMega drives used a combination of magnetic and optical technology. The magnetic coating was "magnetically impermeable" until heated beyond something known as the "Curie Point." Or to put it more simply, it was nearly impossible for the magnetic surface to change its magnetic state unless it was heated to the right temperature to allow the change to take place. (It was known as Magneto-Optical storage) Writing to the drive was done by activating a magnetic field and then directing a finely focussed laser onto the surface to heat just the spot where the data bit was to be stored. It was essential to get the timing exactly right since the spot had to cool down below the Curie Point before the neighbouring bit could be stored, otherwise the neighbouring bit would overwrite the previous bit. Once the surface cooled, the bit was "locked in" until and unless that spot was heated again. (Because of the above, I am presuming that bits on these drives were not stored in successive physical locations on the disk surface but were spread out along each track.) I believe that reading the drive was done optically, due to the magnetic changes to the coating being able to affect how a laser was reflected off the surface. But don't take any of the above as gospel truth, because I only ever learned the basics of how that system worked due to it being quickly overtaken by other, more convenient storage technologies which used simpler and cheaper read/write mechanisms.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

And... someone else has said that all of the above is completely wrong in the iomega drives were simply magnetic and not magneto-optical. Oh well. Live and learn.

[@xirabolt]

Back in the day I had one of those Iomega HipZip MP3 players. I remember juggling between five different discs to see which had enough space for one more song. Also had Creative Zen Micros with the 5GB Microdrive -- still have the drives themselves, in fact! I just ordered a used Zen so I can try accessing those old drives and see what I listened to back then. Probably Linkin Park.

[@katelights]

I even once saw a digital camera that used these for storage.

[@jabrow7135]

Hi Adrian, never tried this on a camcorder but I actually used a laptop hard drive to an adapter to 40 pin IDE to an IDR to CF adapter into a homemade ribbon to my GBA flash cart in my Nintendo DS. The funny part is it was only slightly smaller but way messier than using a standard hard drive, and yes I had to also carry a battery pack and adapter to power the drive and yes it had an adapter from molex to the laptop drive connector.

[@stephenhill4492]

I hope you’re feeling better soon.

[@jjohnson71958]

get well soon... id love to test this product

[@TheMildlyCoolDad]

I had the click MP3 player in the late 90's. I remember it having decent sound quality. Once you had the files on it it was easy to use but that process was slow and it didnt have the greatest battery life. I sold it on after maybe 5-6 months as i went back to a diskman that played MP3s.

[@Godzilla941]

I remember around 2000 in college that all the machines in the computer labs had zip drives. My broke ass used Eudora with a floppy disk. I went back and forth trying to make up my mind between a CD burner or a zip drive as an upgrade...went with the CD burner since there was already an installed base of CD players and CD ROM drives (and the original Napster was big at the time). I haven't really encountered a zip drive anywhere since then.

[@nickwallette6201]

Good choice. Similar up-front cost, way lower per-disc cost, more density per disc, and MUCH wider compatibility. Obviously, for RW use, the ZIP is better, as even CD-RW media is either erase + write full (which takes a while), or add a session (still not as quick as real RW access), or using packet writes (which was a truly awful solution). Best just to have both, then. haha

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

@@nickwallette6201 There was something known as CD-RAM, which allowed random access read-write file storage much like a HDD, but it wasn't used very extensively because storage technology overtook it and made it obsolete.

[@SianaGearz]

I somehow imagined the disks a lot smaller and a little thicker from the scarce magazine pictures! But the ratio between drive size and disk size is quite crazy.

[@1993MAZDAMIATA]

I got covid after going to Disney with my family. Luckily on the last day of the drive home. The test was positive immediately when we got home but the next day I felt totally fine. Get well soon!

[@marcf6806]

Adrian I bought a Click Drive at CompUSA Framingham, MA in May 2000 and it was $149.

[@volvo09]

I think my dad drove me to that CompUSA back in 96 so I could buy my first decent CRT monitor, a 17" Hitachi. Before that all I had was a hand me down 14" that would only do VGA, 640x480@60hz and nothing else.

[@CoMmAnDrX]

I had that and the portable one as well.

[@ifrit05]

PC CARD was ISA based, CardBus (gold bumps near the connector) was PCI based, and ExpressCard used a combo PCIe/USB 2.0 bus.

[@Ice_Karma]

Aha, the CF to PCMCIA adapter is a Type I card, whereas the Clik! drive is a Type II card. Either type would fit into one of the usual two slots in your laptop, whereas Type III had to go in the bottom slot and would chew up both of them.

[@BastetFurry]

I have a 250 MByte USB ZipDisk and it can handle the 100 MByte disks just fine. The drive itself is much more reliable too, as i have several dead 100 MByte drives but that 250 one is still running just fine.

[@invictus0x0]

last time I used one was 20+ years ago, but I remember having to recompile the kernel with a IDE floppy module to get the Clik! to work.

[@eddiehimself]

Yeah, IDE is also known as parallel ATA, which stands for AT Attachment. As in, an attachment for the IBM AT bus AKA 16 bit ISA. Of course, IDE was upgraded to 32-bit to support 32 bit file systems like FAT32 and NTFS. And you can use 32 bit IDE over PCI but also VLB and I imagine MCA as well.

[@diegomartinez7180]

What's the opposite of nostalgia? I LOATHED all those removable disk drives, including 5-1/2 and 3-1/4 floppies. I had nightmares about them. During my college time I had to deliver homework and projects with actual documentation in floppy media. Maybe because this happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s, those things were absurdly slow compared with other types of storage and incredibly unreliable. More than a few times my work was lost and, if I was very lucky, my teacher would contact me to provide the work again, but because some people used to deliver corrupted media to get more time, teachers got to know the drill, so some of them just gave you a failed score. I ended up delivering two copies as a way to improve my odds, but then I had to spend twice as much at a time when I had no money (I was like on my late teens, my parents financed me, so I only had an allowance). And that's without the fact that text documents with images usually had larger sizes than the 1.44MB a floppy could handle so we had to do magic to reduce file sizes. Really, I was very glad when CDs and DVDs took over and then when we could use on-line software.