Was just chatting on ICQ to a former regular on the forums at www.matroxusers.com, and he said he had a cd explode on him the other day. Here's what he had to say:

had a nice thing yesterday, was playing Project Eden from a copied cd...

30 minutes into my level, a loud bang, game crashed, windows crashed, and when I looked down, part of the cd was sticking out of the player.

the cd had exploded.

so I had to take out my cd-player, open it up completely, get all the bits out. The cd was in 5 big chunks and millions of tiny bits...

never seen so much silver :)

He has an ASUS 50x cd-rom that survived the event, but it has been happening in lower speed drives, too.

Apparently the fault is not in the drive, but in the disc itself. He has found other reports of it happening, but unfortunately they're in Dutch, so no point posting links here. :/

It is caused by a flaw in the disc, such as a crack in the data layer or the hole not being dead-center. When the laser hits it, they just shatter.

But this is not just occurring with copied CDs - he said that even original DVDs have been known to do it too. One guy had 2 DVDs do it in different players!

I don't think there's much that can be done to prevent it happening. Just thought I'd post this to see if anyone else here has heard of it happening.

hi cerb.


*bang*

hahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahhahaha pull the other one.

Only time I have seen CD's explode is when I throw them at people and miss hitting something harder than their head or when I shot a whole bunch with an air-rifle.

They are not easy to break at all !! I seriously doubt that a slighly off centre hole will make it shatter, all it will do is f*** your drive. And surely a crack in the data layer is not enough to make is "explode".

I have tried to break many CD's by bending them in half, I know they used to just shatter into little places and go everywhere, but now they seem to just bend and fold over without even cracking.

I've seen a cd break from only a small amount of force.

One of our cd towers here fell over, and as I picked everything up one of the cd's had come out of its case and was cleanly broken into 3 or 4 pieces. And yet I once watched a friend try to snap a cd in half and it took all his effort and the result was a mess of silver and shards of plastic. Not anywhere near as cleen as the on that broke on its own, suggesting that it had some sort of flaw in it to begin with.

Yeah I know a guy that had that happen to him actually.... pretty cool :)

Okay, my friend started this thread a few minutes ago and there's already someone else reporting it happening several times. He says it's heat related.

That makes good sense... disc spinning fast, ad heat to the equation, and small manufacturing flaws and bam!! Exploding CD.

Yeah, the speed a cd spins at must be pretty huge - isn't it like 300rpm for single speed? If so, that would mean 15,000 rpm at 50x.

I've heard of bullets disintegrating from the rotational forces. But the rifle it happened with in the story I read caused the bullet to rotate at up to 180,000rpm! Any sort of weakness at all and the projectile would disintegrate as it left the barrel.

Yeah it happened to mah friend when he was using one of those Demo CD's you get from the Gamers mags.

Little bits of silver $hit went all through his puter. So he took it back to where ever he bought his puter 'cos it was still under warranty but the d00d at the shop said the warranty didn't cover 'exploding CD's' ...bummer :(

Yeah.... and the average projectil would be significantly stronger than a CD.

same thing happened to my comp, and the cd-rom didn't survive.

Yeah I've heard of exploding CD-R/RWs before. So it's not unlikely.

i dont know about exploding cds but when my first cdrom died, there was a horrible clunking noise, the tray flew open and my half life cd was shot at my throat spinning at a rate of knots;

heh, the half life (original) cd was scratched to death;

ouch, thats got to hurt..
i think if you combine the rpm "15,000rpm -cerb" and the heat from the laser is like about 200-300 deg, so i think the humble cd has to be as tough as all bugga..

But the hotter it is the less brittle it should get ??

Can't say I've had an experience with an exploding cd, but I've seen it happen with an exploding hard disk drive. Maybe its the same theory as the exploding cd (flaws on the cd, spinning really fast + heat) except it was probably a flaw on one of the disk platters. The drive was inside a removeable hard drive caddy, we heard a loud BANG, ripped the power out of the computer, and when we took the caddy out it was full of a twisted and shattered hard drive. Pretty nasty stuff, imagine the sort of damage it could do if the caddy wasn't there to contain it...

sounds like i guy who sent his system back to us
his cdrom didn't survive tho

great

i don't want to use cds anymore :/