Iomega's Clik! drive was doomed by its name and the rise of flash storage

At a glance:

• Iomega's Clik! drive (later rebranded PocketZip) was a 40 MB PCMCIA-formatted removable storage device launched in 1999, priced at roughly $10 per disk — far cheaper than the $120–$160 40 MB flash cards of the era.
• The product name echoed the infamous "click of death" associated with Iomega's failing Zip drives, a class-action lawsuit having been filed just one year before the Clik! debuted, making the branding an immediate turnoff for consumers.
• Flash memory prices fell faster than anticipated, and the Clik! format never achieved widespread adoption; Iomega discontinued it by 2002, and the company was eventually acquired by EMC in 2008.

A storage innovator searches for its next hit

The late 1990s were a fertile period for experimental computer peripherals. Iomega had already cemented its reputation with the Zip drive, a removable-storage device that looked and operated much like a traditional floppy disk but offered 100 MB of capacity — a massive leap over the standard 1.44 MB floppy. The Zip drive filled a genuine gap in the market and was adopted quickly across creative and professional workflows. Yet the form factor was bulky, making it a poor fit for the emerging generation of slim laptops and portable devices like digital cameras.

Iomega recognized this gap and set out to build something smaller. The result was the Clik! drive, a storage medium based on tiny 40 MB disks housed in a PCMCIA (PC Card) form factor. The drive could slot flush into the side of a laptop, which was a significant engineering consideration at a time when every millimeter of chassis depth mattered. Iomega's pitch extended beyond laptop users: the company envisioned photographers in the field offloading images from their cameras directly onto a Clik! disk between shoots, and it courted camera and MP3 player manufacturers to build native support for the format.

A name that would not stop haunting

Timing, however, was catastrophically bad. Just one year before the Clik! drive's 1999 launch, Iomega was hit with a class-action lawsuit over widespread "click of death" failures in its Zip drives. The phrase — describing the rhythmic clicking sound a dying hard drive or Zip cartridge makes as its read head repeatedly fails to find data — entered the broader tech lexicon through that very controversy. Anyone who had owned a traditional spinning-platter hard drive for more than a decade knew the sound, and now it was indelibly linked to the Iomega brand.

Naming a brand-new product line "Clik!" in that environment was, to put it mildly, a miscalculation. The name instantly evoked the Zip drive's most notorious failure mode, and the exclamation mark did nothing to soften the association. Iomega quietly rebranded the product to "PocketZip" the following year, but the damage to consumer perception had already been done. The naming mishap was not the sole cause of failure, but it certainly gave prospective buyers one more reason to walk away.

Why flash memory made Clik! obsolete before it could compete

The deeper problem was technological trajectory. In 1999, a 40 MB CompactFlash or SmartMedia card cost between $120 and $160, which initially gave the Clik! disk a compelling price advantage at around $10. But flash memory prices were falling at a pace that spinning-disk media could not match. Flash had no moving parts, consumed less power, and was inherently more durable in portable devices — exactly the qualities camera manufacturers and laptop OEMs were prioritizing.

Clik! drives, by contrast, still relied on a tiny spinning platter. That mechanical complexity made them less reliable, slower in random-access scenarios, and ultimately unable to keep pace with the plummeting cost-per-megabyte of solid-state storage. Iomega attempted to court camera and MP3 player manufacturers, but the industry had already placed its bets on flash. The few commercial products that shipped with Clik! support came and went almost as quickly as the format itself.

The thin ecosystem: Agfa, HipZip, and little else

Only a handful of third-party products ever shipped with native Clik! support. The most notable was the Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik!, a digital camera that could write captured images directly to a Clik! disk. Alongside it, Iomega released its own HipZip MP3 player, which used the same 40 MB media for music storage. Together, these two devices represented the entirety of the Clik! ecosystem outside of Iomega's own PCMCIA drive.

Neither product achieved meaningful market penetration. Consumers and OEMs alike saw the writing on the wall — solid-state storage was the future — and no amount of clever engineering on a spinning-disk platform could change that narrative. By 2002, Iomega had discontinued the Clik! line entirely.

Legacy of a format that solved a problem already being solved

Iomega's Clik! drive is not remembered as a bad product in an engineering sense. Its price-per-megabyte advantage was real, and the PCMCIA implementation was reasonably elegant for its time. The fundamental mistake was strategic: Iomega tried to compete in a market where the dominant solution — flash memory — was already on an unstoppable cost and performance trajectory. The company needed the camera and portable-device industries to rally behind Clik! the way the PC industry had rallied behind the Zip drive, but that cooperation never materialized.

Iomega was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, and the brand gradually faded from consumer relevance. Flash storage, meanwhile, went on to underpin SSDs, SD cards, USB drives, and the internal storage of virtually every smartphone on the planet. The Clik! drive serves as a useful case study in how even a technically competent product can fail when it bets against the direction of an entire industry.