CD Exploded
 

Yesterday at work a woman came into the store with her computer and said that her son blew up her computer. In reality, a cd had exploded into a thousand peices in her Samsung 52x cd-rom drive. It was not a burned cd, but a high quality factory made cd. I can only imagine the sound it made as it was diced into a thousand shards of plastic. Has anyone else had this happen to them?

Wow.

that would be an interesting experience. the only thing that i have witnessed that is slightly similar would have to be the old 'cd in a microwave trick', but that isn't an explosion... more of a lightning storm followed by a nasty smell. :lol:

Yah m8t, heard about this quite a few times... Work at Compaq's Customer relations.... anywho.

First time that happened it turned out the guy's daughter thought she would pretty up, her Disney cd with some stickers... Once it started to spin, the stickers came unglewed and blam... instant drive explosion. It's a good thing the faceplate didn't come apart as it kept the pieces from hitting the little girl. I saw the pics and it looked like someone put a cherry bomb in there.

Another time, the result was the same, but the cause was that the cd had been left on a window ledge and had a "micro" bend in it that turned into a crack.... when it spun up it started to wobble inside the cd.

It's pretty scary when you think about it, your spinning a plastic disk at extrem speeds. So imagine what will happen should something unstablize it.

Yeah, like Raven, it has never actually happened to me (the chances of this happening under normal circumstances are extremely low), but I've heard multiple accounts of it. I thought it was kind of funny, once, when I was reading the specs, or a review of a CD drive of some sort, they actually listed a reinforced drive bezel as a feature, specifically to prevent shattered discs from injuring the user.

Yes, I heard of this, and seen 2 drives afterwards. at 52x the disk is spinning around 10k RPM, any crack or defect may cause the disk to disenagrate.
they actually breck due to plastic "creep" (wrong word, trying to think, but nothin' happens :lol: ) and it takes several minutes at high speed for it to occur.
saw a site a while back (looking for link) where they had done tests on most brands of disks to see when the fail.
most exploded around 22k rpm right away, but all failed at lower speeds after a short time.
Can't find it now, I will post it later if I can find it.

Ok, finally found a mirror site.
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/users/tom/mirrors/cdexplode/
At first I thought this was a joke, but it appears the guy was serious. interesting to look at.
I do remember reading a few years ago that 48x would be the maximum safe speed for cd's, so maybe we're all living on the edge at 52-56x

Most of the picture links are dead at the site (the best part!)
so here's the original site (in swedish) if you want to see the pics
http://www.qedata.se/js_n-cdrom.htm

I'll translate it with the pictures and upload it later to twl perhaps

here we go

http://www.techwarelabs.com/cdexplode

Humm, I wonder if that's what caused my Tribes 2 cd to split from the inside out in my 56x? It didn't explode but it suddenly stopped working one day and when I ejected it, it has a huge crack in it. I never took it out so maybe it was starting to feel the stress. :shake: