No drives have been made with the Iomega brand since LenovoEMC shut down the Iomega brand in approximately 2013, so while it’s true that you will see these drives still working today, they’re no longer new drives, and because of this almost every Iomega external device still in service is going to be old hardware. And as we know, old hardware dies. The bench still sees many of them: eGo portable hard drives, Prestige desktop external hard drives (and also UltraMax), StorCenter network storage units, and even an occasional legacy Zip. When they die, they typically do so in a few characteristic ways, but usually their data can be recovered as long as the drive isn’t made to keep fighting death.
Many times the enclosure's main circuit board is an integral part of the recovery process and should be left with the hard drive.
The "Iomega" name can apply to a variety of hardware products, and the product will impact how your data is recovered. The eGo series were portable USB bus-powered external drives that didn't require a separate power supply. The Prestige and UltraMax lines included desktop units that had to be plugged into mains power; often times the UltraMax was a dual drive system operating in either RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored). StorCenter units were NAS (network attached storage) devices, which sometimes contained multiple bays for use as multi-drive NAS systems. Prior to these modern externals there existed the well-known Zip and Jaz removable media cartridges. It is interesting to note that the term 'click of death' was originally used to describe a failure mode on Iomega Zip drives, when a slightly out-of-position read/write head would click and could damage every Zip cartridge put into it. The more modern Iomega external hard drives are simply standard computer hard drives placed inside an Iomega branded casing (which makes recovering from data loss easier).
There's rarely anything exciting about an Iomega drive failure: usually it's simply time. The mechanical drive that is at the heart of these units will have been spinning for over a decade in many cases. Heads, bearings and the lubricants used in them do not last forever. Power supplies and the small components that are mounted on the bridge board also degrade with age. In addition, because these units are so old, finding donor parts can be difficult. So another good reason to disconnect from power if you suspect your Iomega unit is failing is that the margin between being able to successfully read data from your unit versus having the mechanism seize up is smaller than it would be for a newer unit. At the first sign of trouble (clicking, not mounting, or the device disappearing), shut off power.
Like other externals, some Iomega boxes have "work" done on them by a circuit board: USB-to-SATA conversion and, on select boxes, hardware encryption. Open up the box, remove the drive from its home and hook it up as a bare drive, then it may not read cleanly even though the drive is good, due to the fact that there are other components involved in reading it. As stated previously, the process should always follow this principle: leave the drive inside the enclosure and leave the board intact (even a dead one), then proceed through normal channels. This is the shucking trap in disguise.
The dual-drive desktops and network units have another issue in that they disperse information over more than just one disk (striped, mirrored or parity-protected). One disk removed from an UltraMax or StorCenter with multiple bays has no value as a separate entity until it is put back into its proper array layout. Therefore do not send one drive from a multi-disk unit and keep the other drives for some sort of "backup": get a quote first, through our web form or by telephone, then send all of your drives, each labelled with the bay it came from, so we may rebuild the array from images based upon how it was intended to reside. If a StorCenter's disks won't come out, send the whole unit instead.
Iomega drive clicking, not mounting, or a multi-bay unit gone dark? Power off the drive. Keep a single drive in its case and do not open it up. For multi-disk systems, remove each disk; label which disk came from each bay. The diagnostic is free. The quote will be fixed and provided to you in writing. And you can get a straight answer with no charge on 0131 202 0491.