Kitz Forum
Computers & Hardware => PC Hardware => Topic started by: tonyappuk on May 06, 2008, 02:24:25 AM
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A friend of mine who builds PCs for individuals and companies told me about this the other day and I thought others here might be interested. Of course you may all have heard of the phenomenon before but neither he nor I had and Google has very few entries on the subject.
Having built a new system almost the last thing he did was fit and test a DVD writer. He left it doing a test burn and walked across the workshop. There was a loud bang and he turned round expecting to see the machine dead but no it was still going and no smoke! On inspection the DVD writer would not eject but releasing the mechanical latch eventually let the drawer out to reveal the DVD disc in a million pieces.
Talking to his supplier revealed it was not unknown for this to happen and was it put down to faulty media. Although not obliged to they replaced the writer which would no longer function.
My friend has built hundreds of PCs and has never heard of this before and neither of us can think of a reasonable mechanism to explain how it is caused.
Tony
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I hadn't heard of this phenomenon before, but apparently it's quite true. If you Google for 'exploding cds' you'll get lots of hits. It seems to be the result of manufacturing defects combined with spinning at high speeds.
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I've heard of it, but never witnessed it... then again I don't burn CD's.
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It used to be fairly common - for instance I've seen it happen twice from a sample of probably 400-500 machines that I've built, mainly in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
I believe it was mainly caused by early generations of CD-R and DVD-R disks which was exacerbated by dodgy labelling systems making the media more unbalanced. I've never seen or heard of it occurring with pressed media - yes there are google hits saying it happens but I've never heard of it from anyone I trust.
If this happened recently then your friend should be making a note of the batch number of the disks and possibly buying slightly more expensive media to test with? This is very rare now - even at around 10p/disk. There are some seriously dodgy disks out there once you go below 5p right enough :)
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i've delt with this problem loads of times over the past decade where our customers have heard bangs and the drawer wont then eject of if it does then fragments of disk have come out.
this has been with cd/cdr/cdrw/dvd/dvdr etc, pressed or written.
we always replace the drive coz on a few occasions where the engineers has taken the drive apart to get the fragments out, theres almost always some bits left behind which clog it up eventually which means enother engineer visit.
its usually cheep or already semi-damaged media which causes it.
then we get the problem 'your drive broke my disk so you can buy me a new one'
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then we get the problem 'your drive broke my disk so you can buy me a new one'
Some people are never satisfied.
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It actually happened to me once.
Although I must admit it was my own fault and fortunately the writer was not damaged.
What happened was, I was about to burn a CD, when I placed the blank into the tray I noticed a small crack coming from the centre of the disc about a 5mm long, but I carried on anyway. (until the bang)
Basically it could not withstand the forces being applied so just broke up into pieces.
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Just out of interest, what kind of noise does it make?
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Just out of interest, what kind of noise does it make?
For me it was just a very loud "Bang" like a big balloon popping.
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mythbusters tested how fast they could get a dvd to spin before it would explode and i think they got it upto around 20000 rpm.
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> mythbusters tested how fast they could get a dvd to spin before it would explode and i think they got it upto around 20000 rpm.
And that was without a crack in it.
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Just out of interest, what kind of noise does it make?
For me it was just a very loud "Bang" like a big balloon popping.
I can't wait.
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I can't wait.
??
Just think if by the merest of coincidences it just happened as you opened the CD tray.
Possibly one face makeover in the offing.
I can't wait. "Sure"
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You have all shamed me with your reports of it happening loads of times. And there I was thinking I was discovering something new! There's no fool like an old fool, or something like that. Slinks off into corner.
Tony