CD shattered in CD-drive

[Balgovind]

hie,

While I was playing a cd-game on my computer, I heard some cracking noise and the game stuck itself. I pressed the ESC button but no use, the game remained stucked. So I opened the CD-drive to check....., but I found the CD had shattered into pieces..../ what is this ? Can anybody explain what the hell had happened ??

[Fabian]

Ohh !!! This is really sad. This problem happens very rarely but it's not completely unheard-of. When an object spins at very high speed, it sometimes puts itself under a lot of strain and causes to break itself into pieces..which worsely causes loss of data..

Drives rated at 52x typically spin somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 rpm. This is not enough to shatter a disc in good condition, but more than enough to destroy a disc with minor defects. This is one reason why Sony's 52x drives default to 40x maximum, with a "turbo boost" feature that enables 52x reading and writing.

[RoninBlade]

Some types of CD/DVD cases can cause such fractures on the inner areas of the discs. This had happened to one of my friends also. He found two long cracks on his DVD when he opened his DVD drive to reseat the DVD properly.

[Hardwareman]

CD shatter is one of the more bizarre ways of killing PC components

The reasons could be -
- a drive spindle motor getting out of alignment and the disk starts wobbling about all over the place.
- a disk itself is not balanced, gets out of whack, hits something inside the drive and goes horribly pear-shaped.