Establishing the Maximum Speed of a CD-ROM Drive

UnknownSoldier writes "Ever wondered how fast CD-ROM drives can spin their CDs before the CD will self destruct due to centrifugal force? This person was too, and has his results. (So much for those 100x drives)."

Comments

Google cache

[awptic]

The google cache for this page is here

Re:Who would want one?

[hendridm]

32x might be exxagerating a little, but I know my 50x sounds like a jet engine taking off when it spins up.

Future drives will have to take advantage of technologies like TrueX to be tolerable.

Then again, how fast do I really need my CD-ROM to be? I mean, I only use my CD-ROM to 1) reinstall the system and 2) to play music. A 32x CD-ROM is plenty fast to accomplish both of these tasks.

The point of this experiment wasn't to push technology but to do something silly to wow your geek friends. (Then again, I didn't read the link since it was Slashdotted after a measely 6 posts).

Re:You can make them faster...

[quintessent]

Kenwood made a drive that does this. It spins at around 10x and reads at 72x. Unfortunately, they have discontinued it.

Another Mirror

[hendridm]

This one has no broken images.

Bla bla bla

[SevenTowers]

Afreey and Infineon already have a 100x (TrueX) CD-Rom drive (25x DVD)", it came out in 2001...

This is the future (but who cares, we'll go solid state before it gets popular).

Re:There's no such thing as centrifugal force.

[Da Schmiz]

According to Webster's, centripetal (from centr- + Latin petere to go to, seek) means "proceeding or acting in a direction toward a center or axis". By this definition, in the ball-on-a-string example, the string provides the centripetal force.

Webster's also says that centrifugal (from centr- + Latin fugere to flee) means "proceeding or acting in a direction away from a center or axis"

This is what I remember from Physics 101. However, I may be wrong, seeing as you are the one claiming to be the "physics geek". In any case, however, your definition is contrary to standard, correct English usage.

Re:Why even spin the disk at all?

[MadCow42]

It's called an "acoustic optical modulator", my old company uses them all the time in their laser photographic printers.

We modulate a laser beam on the order of 14 million times a second, actually a lot more than that. Check out www.cymbolic.com (LightJet / PlateJet products).

MadCow.