I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV.

My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.

I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.

Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.

Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.

The only true "click of death" involved physically damaged disks. It was possible for a damaged disk to also damage any drive it was inserted in. Outside of that, the "click of death" was really just the drive retracting and reinserting the head on a read error.

I experienced click of death using my zip disks at a school lab.

The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.

I used Zip disks extensively for audio and graphics work. Almost all the drives I encountered died after a while.

It was a design issue.

It was very common, or at least made out to be.

I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)