LGR Oddware - Iomega Clik! Tiny 40MB Disk Drive 

Want to see _inside_ of the Clik PCMCIA drive? Here's a bonus clip for you! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SX4mA2m8kO0.html I didn't fully disassemble it when I made the Oddware episode because doing so destroys the drive, just due to the glue used and flimsy metal getting bent -- at least without the correct tools/skills. But well, now that I am convinced the drive is very much dead anyway, I figured "hey, why not rip it open and look at its guts."

I worked at Iomega during the Clik era. They were **really** proud of the sound it made when you put a disk in. Management wanted it to feel like a clicky ball point pen for some reason. I think that's why they stuck with the name for so long, even in the face of the Click of Death. They were very attached to that idea. A bit of trivia: the movie Minority Report used removable media shaped like a Clik disk. You can see the little black plastic corners and the overall shape of the thing, but all the actual metal and disk bits were replaced with a transparent piece. The holographic UI effects were then layered onto the transparent portion.

Duke 3D: LGR's version of: "Can it run Crysis?" :D

You should do an Oddware episode for April Fools which treats something not odd (like USB drives) as if they never caught on and are not in use today.

13:16 Well not a Click of Death but the Death of a Clik, huh?

Oh man the sound of insertion for those disks is pretty satisfying

You know Clint, I had no interest in the kind of things you're interested in until I started watching your videos. I used to just watch your video game reviews for a quick caption of what I could expect to find, eventually migrating myself to your other videos to see what you did. Honestly I'm still not that jazzed on most of the old hardware, it's how enraptured you are; you know your shit on so many subjects, and honestly it's your interest in the subject that holds my interest in your videos. I mean I just spent 17 minutes watching a video about a freakin zipdrive. You are extremely engaging and you do an absolutely fantastic job, and I just wanted to say thank you.

The PCMCIA versions dying like that was a common occurrence in my experience. I was a tech at a high volume (50+ daily) laptop repair facility from the late 90's through the 2000's. A particular pharmaceutical customer used those Clik drives along with Zip drives for additional backup storage for all their field reps. It seemed like the PCMCIA Clik drives were quite unreliable for them, not to mention the click of death on the Zip drives also being a big issue. As broadband service rolled out to more and more areas in the early 2000's they adopted using client/server based backup software instead and phased out all forms of media like the Clik and Zip drives which meant the facility I worked at got thousands of those drives, media and so on dumped on us when that happened!

I feel like if you were able to press the files of Duke Nukem 3D onto a Vinyl Record, and somehow play it off of that you would. You already have ways to store it on a VHS tape.

It could hold an entire mp3 file and a picture of Cindy Crawford at the same time! Wow!

That product at 5:40 is the most early 2000's thing I've ever seen. Look at those beautiful rounded edges. Look at that oval screen. It's like staring into the face of early 2000's God.

I remember seeing these on the R&D desk when I was working at Iomega in 1997. For '97 tech they were amazing, but being released in '99 they were pretty much a flash in the pan. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

"Boss, our technology is becoming obsolete. What do we do?" "Carry on and double-down."

Plus that Windows 95 start up sound was sweet, sweet nostalgia.

Almost reminds me of a PSP UMD.

“Mmmm Windows 95 ❤️” I appreciate the subtitles, Clint! English is not my native language so having very well written subtitles helps a lot to better understand what you’re seeing. You da’ man, Clint!

The disks are adorable, it would be so cool to have a revival of that design

That Clik! Camera kit has more parts and assembly than some Lego sets.

The dying drive sounded like a distressed duck ;(

13:00 The sounds it made when it died was just satisfying, lovely!

I remember seeing those in stores back in the day... Never crossed my mind to buy one. $300 was back then food for a month plus a few movie tickets...

go back to 1999 with a 64gb usb stick and watch people loose their minds.

I love the concept of these things. They're like a 1980's idea of what future storage media might look like.

LGR: Nat Geo of vintage computing. Love your channel, takes me back to when I started to work with computers more seriously.

The "click of death" is something I immediately thought of when I saw the title of this video. A bit of a marketing blunder there, since the term 'click of death' STARTED with iomega zip disc drives. It now refers to similar sounds from dead hard drives when the read/write heads continuously attempt and fail to seek, so even now it isn't an especially good idea. It's a fascinating little thing and its appearance reminds me a little of the UMDs that the PSP used - optical discs built in to their own protective caddy, instead of a magnetic disc in the case of the Clik. Too bad for it that flash memory and compact HDDs ended up overtaking it rapidly in pretty much every way.

I found one of these in clearance bin once around Father's Day long ago, and I also thought the idea was really neat (I used to use Zip disks a lot for work anyways), so I got a couple and gave one to Dad. Neither of us ever used it, at all (afaik). I never even opened mine I just had no actual use for it.

Love when I get a notification for LGR and I happen to be online... WOOT WOOT Thx Clint!

Man. Seeing your videos increase in production value over the years is amazing. Great content!

Old Ben: "Iomega - that's a name I've not heard in long time"

I didn't know they had PCMCIA cards like that for non-flash storage, neato All I've ever used were networking cards and various interfaces

Oh yeah : ) - I had the MP3 player that used those - lots of memories of sitting on the school bus listening to Linkin Park, 'Cos I got High' and 'Baby Got Back'

Hey Clint, you're looking really well. Thanks so much for your videos. I never knew that watching someone go thrifting and discuss pieces of tech (that I had little prior interest in!) could be such great therapy during this current low point I'm experiencing. I've seen many comments about people enjoying your videos during depressive or difficult phases; the fact that your honest, enthusiastic self and your well-made videos have helped so many get through little rough patches in life is something you should be incredibly proud of.

Dude that IBM Microdrive looks so friggen cool! You should def do an Oddware episode on it!!

I have to admit, that design and build quality reallz does look great even today. At least for that base drive. Great video as always

I still have around 80 of these things, filled with early 2000 documents galore. I first bought one for my Sony PictureBook (PCMCIA version), remember those, I even had the best and last one, though any computer with a Transmeta CPU, can't really be called the best, in fact the previous generation using a Pentium 2, was actually faster. Though I used Debian Linux, so the PictureBook wasn't that slow. I continued to use the Click drive for about 10 years in almost all of my notebooks and early tablets, I actually loved the medium, it was perfect for storing data for long deration's of time that needed to still be accessible in a moments notice. I finally replaced the system with a Sony Magneto-optical drive and than later Mini-Disks, yes, Sony actually made a data orientated Mini-Disk drive, the very rare Sony MDH-10, I still use it today for data when I want to store data at the bank, Don't worry, I have two, unopened Sony MDH-10 drives, I bought all three of them when they were being sold for less than $100. MiniDisk data disks actually last a long time, I have yet to have seen any data corruption as of yet.

man, all your videos lately feel like LGR Tech Tales, you put so much effort in all of them!

I love your Oddware series. Thank you very much for all of your work.

13:13 That's just the TURBO kicking in! Don't leave the clutch out, you'll over-rev it. 13:30 See, you flooded it.

I still have a few old flash drives with like 128MB AND 256MB. Back then that was a lot. Seeing as MP3 files were around 3MB it was the main use for having large capacities. People would use CD-R DIsk to put movies in that were like 700MB Per movie

That flashy photo at 11:55 cracks me up

I was at Comdex when the click came out.. iOmega gave out these little noise "clickers" culminating in the most annoying show floor ever!

Ahhhhh, LGR. My favorite excuse to not be working.

I remember being completely blown away when the 100 MB ZipDisks came out during the 90s when I was a teenager. Oh, it was at a local CompUSA too. Yet another relic from another time :) Now I'm watching an HD video over a phone that has 128gb of storage and 8gbs of RAM. Amazing how far we have come.

No matter how hard my day sucks, but when i start one of your videos, i become relaxed again :)

Your videos are great to show to my 12 year old stepdaughter who believes nothing existed before smartphones and tablets.

Hell yea some oddware to brighten my day

hi there, you brought back my school years back to life, it was the standard for my school medium at the time, they were great. ahhh fond memories

Oh man, I love LGR. I love Oddware. I love your “will it run Duke 3D?” approach to these things and odd bits. You are a gentleman, and a scholar.

Pish posh! In that alphabet soup of late '90s portable storage media, how could you forget the mighty Caleb UHD144 "it" drive!? Actually, the problem was that when it was introduced in 1998, nobody else noticed it, either...

Love your vids Clint

You made my weekend much better 😁

Talk about timing! I watched this video over breakfast and by chance was given the PC Card version by the afternoon, cool 🤗! Just hope my one doesn’t die as quick as yours.

For some reason at 10:44 I got the strange urge to listen to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer.

Love to hear the W95 Startup sound. Kinda like the 1995 PSX start up; nostalgia

16:30 I remember this standing on my own store's shelf in Germany, getting older day by day, and not a single customer buying it; occasionally asking about it.

Great video! (oooh that Win 95 startup theme ding ding ding) By 2000 I was using my 4X CD-R burner for backing up and was hardly using my Zip drive.

HipZip was my first mp3 player. I selected it because it was the cheapest per MB at the time and I liked swappable storage. It was pretty solid, actually.

Please make a disassembly video of your dead pcmcia drive ! I want to see how they managed to put all the mechanism for a magnetic drive in a such small volume !

I loved my iOmega Zips but had no idea this product even existed! Amazing! Thanks!

Nice. I'm watching this on my lunch break. Thank you!

Didn't even know this existed. I switched from Zip to Jazz drives as quick as I could.

A typically good video: thank you. I hope you'll look into the Jaz drive next. I had two Zip drives (100 and 250MB) but the Jaz drive I only saw in advertisements.

Weird. I've never seen or heard of this before. Interesting video as always!

I have no idea why I find this fascinating. Another good video LGR.

Reminds me of the Mini-Disc.

PCMCIA to Compact Flash adaptors are often used in the Amiga community to act as hard drives.

In 2003 my parents bought my brother and I our first digital cameras. I still have the 32mb compact flash card we bought for mine. Storage used to cost a lot! I remeber being mesmerised by that little square piece of plastic. I can see why storage mediums like this didn't last long. The solid state SD and compact flash cards are so much more elegant.

That delightful grinding failure noise is amazing. Worth it just for that.

"Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for cliking up my ride"

The Clik! PC Card is shockingly prone to heat wear. They work a lot better if your PC card bay isn't exposed to the heat of the CPU too much. I noticed this on my IBM T23 and it's dock. The internal card slot frequently caused failure in the PC card, to the point it couldn't detect the discs. However, when I insert the card into the dock, far from the laptop's CPU, performance was near perfect with no failure.

Dear LGR, thank you for playing that Windows 95 boot sound every time. Even if I didn't have a PC when it came out (I was just a yougin'), I used to go to my uncle who always had all the greatest hardware. And even if I didn't understand it back then, this sound coming through his overpowered Cambridge Soundworks system (with subwoofer!), reminded me of the excitement that awaits. Keep it up!

Ahhhhh, today is a good day! Friday, LGR, my sandwich and my beer. Thanks man, a BIG shout out from Brazil!

"The adventure is just starting for us!" Excellent hahahah

I have one of those and 3 disks.. It makes a cool noise when writing

that was just so odd !! 😄 love your oddware episodes clint 👍 keep e’m comming.

You're looking better and better as time goes by.

3:51 for satisfying click sound. You're welcome.

awh yus more LGR

Nice, Brings backup memories, shows how far we have come....

Great Video!! Love your channel!! You have great stuff and very entertaining!! Very informative also!!

Damn! Great childhood memories! I had some of these together with an Iomega HipZip: www.activewin.com/reviews/hardware/zip/hipzip/images/disks.jpg It was really nice walking around with a bunch of MP3s playing from this tiny disk. The HipZip was really cool and not much larger than a regular tape walk man. And I also messed around with WMA encoding so I could fit more songs on those 40 megabytes.

Probably not the best design, though it was innovative for its' time. It most certainly did provide a learning tool for others. No, I've never actually used one of these; I had seen it once, but I was a bit too young to comprehend it.

I really like the yellow backdrop, nice touch!

Ho nice! Love the new background and the “orange thing”!

All these overcomplicated obsolete physical media are great. Sometimes I wish we lived in a internetless world so all physical media could be back.

You always upload around lunch, which is when I'm able to watch videos. Yeah, I should be social, but why should I if LGR uploads?

Wow, that click sound sounds sooo satisfying!

Fascinating, as always

🤔 These are somewhat reminiscent of the storage "discs" used in Minority Report.. Hehe

Clint! Drive

I really enjoy seeing this kind of thing. There’s something fascinating about refined versions of older technology.

really nice video Clint, thankyou.

i still have mine and i still used it

Everything about the camera kit just seems so cumbersome and roundabout, all to transfer a "small" 64MB CF card onto a "large" 40MB clik. Gee I wonder why this failed.

This is a nice video Clint you're the best :)

Thanks for this vid. Always wanted to have one of these back in the day...

this vid is clikbait 😉

Gotta love the old days of 90's pcing where it would say "100% complete!" for like 4-5 minutes straight. No wait that sucked and noone liked it. Bad design microsoft!

love these videos! so informative and neat. i like looking through thrift stores near my house and my parents house when i visit them in their home state. there’s this little thrift store/cafe near their house!

Excellent video! Thank you!