A few days ago I went out and bought a ** Brand New** eMachines computer. I tried installing a CD in the drive and while uploading, that entire CD shattered. :eek: I have never in my life (ever) either heard of, or had this happen to me. Does anyone here have an explanation of what may have happened that caused this?
Mythbusters did a show on this awhile ago. Apparently, it is quite frequent, and it happens whenever the CD is spinning faster than its structure permits.
They were able to shatter a lot of CDs, needless to say.
Misleading title that. (Hard drive is your main storage, hidden away inside the case) What was the CD?
Well why is not suprising. From my faulty memmory I recall that the rotational velocity of a CD can hit the 60 m/s a range [~130 mph]. If there is then some sort of structural weakness in the CD, the high velocity will agitate that defect and make it more and more prominent. Eventually the CD is pushed past some sort of critical structure point and it fragments.
Think this was in GQ a while back. Similar sort of thing can happen if you burn and label your own CD with a sticker that’s off centre apaprantly, the wobble can cause the CD to shatter.
Also can happen if there’s another non-symmetrical sticker somewhere on the CD, like, say, a library barcode sticker. I’d guess that it would be more likely to throw off the balance the nearer to the edge that it is.
I think it was somewhere around 60X that the chance of disc failure becomes prominent. Even so, if it’s an old disc that’s been repeatedly snapped into and out of it’s case, you can have tiny cracks or work hardening around the central hole.
What’s the speed of your drive?
I had it happen to me with an older (ie: not all that fast) drive. I assume it was a flawed disk.
That episode was on just last night on the Discovery Channel. (At least up here in Canada.) Spooky… or is it? :dubious:
It was a CD for RealFlight G2 Radio Control Flight Simulator
** Lobsang** - You are correct. I meant to state that the CD was in my CD drive Not my hard drive…Thank you for the correction 
Not sure if this has been mentioned. You may notice on packs of blank cds that they state the maximum speed of the drive. I didn’t really know what this meant until this thread. Now I realize that it may mean if you insert those cds into anything faster they may shatter, or the read surface may get damaged.
Anecdote: I once inserted an old CD-R into my read-only drive. When it got up to full speed I hear some strange crackly tearing noises. I took the cd out to investigate and found that some of the metal write surface (which seems to be at the edge rather than in the middle of the cd) had peeled off.
(bolding mine)
There’s yer problem right there 
I asked this in GQ a few months back after a library CD shattered in my kid’s computer and the library wanted me to pay to replace the CD-Rom. I didn’t object to paying for it (even if it was a Teletubbies CD) if it were my fault but given that it had a sticker on it, off-centre, I was a bit miffed when the librarian refused to even discuss it, saying that the library tech said I had to have done ‘something’ to the CD-rom.
I printed out the stuff from that thread and the link and she waived the fee.
This happened with me as well. Here’s the GQ thread: