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When Spun Really Fast, CDs Explode
Anonymous Coward writes: "Ever wonder why cd-rom/cd-rw drives are not getting any faster? Wonder why they heat up? This page has a rather amusing experiment where they put various CD's into something that can spin up to 30,000RPM and found that most cd's explode at just around 28,000RPM. Oh and they seem to like using Corel CD-ROM discs for their experiment." Update: Yep, it's a dupe...
I prefer to just microwave mine..
no soup for you
... the strong sponge shapoe would make them much stronger for their weight...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Don't those 52X ones have multiple read heads so they don't actually have to spin that fast?
also you can always just put more data on the disk. I mean maybe you could never read a 100GB disk faster than 52X, but thats still like 100GB of data read in a minute or two
They should at least have chosen AOL CDs to destroy. Sheesh.
Al.
REPOst repost repost repost
Why Corel CDSs? They should use all those AOL freebies...
A lot of bands might consider exploding CDs a feature. :-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Going to go ahead and be redundant and say that I saw this story somewhere else not too long ago... ...Oh yeah, it was here!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Slashdotted in less then a minute!
No need to hack a site to down it, just sumbit it in a story to slashdot.
'sall in the title.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
A new way to dispose of those stupid AOL CD's that you get in the mail!
But I wonder if you do this to a music CD, if the RIAA will sue you for destroying someones intelectual property...?
Interesting Question
just a post a link to it on slashdot and BOOM, there goes your hard drive...
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
don't I remember hearing something about hard drive platters being spun so fast they either vibrate off the spindle and shoot off, or just shatter? I think it's a limitation of spinning just about anything fast enough.
Inconceivable!
Being /.'d twice in, what, the same year so far? Oooouch.
;-D
(or did they just not ever come back from the last one)?
oh well Google Cache still works.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I hope the server doesn't explode as well ...
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:UaTCrUMQitYC: www.qedata.se/e_js_n-cdrom.htm+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
I cannot access the page seems even the page has spun out of control!
This story (with the same URL) was posted here. I know duplicate-URL checking wouldn't help everything, but it could at least catch stuff like this...
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Maybe if they spun the laser it would be faster, since the disk seems to have more mass. Or better yet the spin the laser in the other direction of the disk so they are both spining.
-James
In other news, VA Linux has found that when Slashdot Janitors are "spun-up" too quickly, they dont think enough before posting old news, and crap like this gets regurgitated.
Several minutes after it got posted, after 1am in the USA, only 6 comments so far, and I still can't get to the page. Sigh.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Yeah, it's pretty bad when fark.com gets stories weeks ahead of /.
no soup for you
This is exactly what a friend observed, although at a lower speed of 20x, IIRC: he inserted a CD that had a small crack which he noticed but didn't worry about. The CD drive spun up and then *BANG* *crunch* *crackle* :-) He had to completely replace his CD drive. And that was already about two years ago... made him look at his CD's more carefully and not to ignore cracks ;-)
I can see it now, the RIAA manufacturing discs that experience structural failure when you spin them faster than 1X to rip them....
:-)
oh boy.
Wonder what happens if you spin a floppy at 30,000 rpm?
nt
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/19/166228 &mode=thread&tid=137
/.'ed twice in less than 6 monthes...
Too bads its been
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
i don't know why i'm surprised.
I wonder when we will have CDROM/DVD/anything dirves which have "spinning" laser beams instead of the mechanical super fast stuff which is the weakest part in these drives. The disk would be in a fixed position. *That* should work at faster speeds.
I want to see more of this kind of story!
I want to see what else can explode in my box. I want to see what happens (with big color pictures) to to a hard drive at 20000 atmospheres of pressure. I want to see ASUS vs ABit mobo's head to head for resisting g-forces. I want to see what happens when you force 100,000 volts through a cat-5 cable.
Isn't this what the internet is all about, pictures of stuff exploding, videos of people endangering their lives for my tittlation while discovering what happens if you fill a case with gasoline and run it as a server. Get cracking people.
that's vinyl, not vynil :)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:UaTCrUMQitYC: www.qedata.se/e_js_n-cdrom.htm+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
namely, Establishing the Maximum Speed of a CD-ROM Drive on 19 april /. archives?
c'mon, chrisd, is it too much to look over michaels's shoulder once in a while, or search the
--
cecil was wondering, so we set up a poll. what do you think?
united states nuclear device terrorist bioweapon encryption cocaine korea syria iran iraq columbia cuba
Are only good for one thing...
-= MASTURBATION =-
P.S. Obey me mother fuckers!
A while ago, there was a rumor among the folk who make nasty treats like disk bombs that one could do a similar thing with CDs. It ended up just being a product of an accident, as so many destructive things are. If you crack a CD and put it in one of the new high speed readers (or my bloody noisy plextor cd burner), the cd with fly apart and make horrible sounds, not to mention possibly break all kinds of things inside your drive.
just post a link to it on slashdot and BOOM there goes your money.
Oh great. Now CD players will be banned from planes.
Table-ized A.I.
It seems slashdot has uncovered the perfect Denial of service attack. The first step involves linking to the site on slashdot's homepage, then millions of unsuspecting geeks, click the link simultaneously, overloading the webserver. One geek was quoted as mumbling something about being a couple seconds to late to see all the l33t stuff the site was supposed to contain. Then the attack continues, by reposting the link in another story, a dupe so to speak, that ensnares even more geeks. But alas, when will this slashdotting criminals be brought to justice.
This story was on Slashdot like 4-6 months ago (not sure of the date). I'd give you a link but Slashdot's search feature is just a placeholder for an actual working and useful search engine - as is the case on most websites these days.
Is it so hard to post the link? Or is HTML too difficult for you?
So, has anyone tried to rig up something with a laser and a bunch of spinning mirrors, so that the disc can actually stay still while being read? It'd be a more complex mechanism, but it could go arbitrarily fast without stressing the CD at all.
Boy, talk about your new and improved CD burners...
It's slashdotted; I've at least got the text mirrored; images added as I get them.
e xp lode
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/users/tom/mirrors/cd
Find yourself an old 40x (or so) drive that you no longer need and get ready for some fun (tested on tray load drives only so far).
:)
:)
Grab an AOL or old magazine CD and make a few small cracks (so they don't go into the data area) about 1cm long on the inner edge of the CD (aka the hole in the middle of the CD). Then put it in your high speed CD reader and start reading data - with luck after a minute or so (maybe longer) you will hear a loud BANG and the CD will no longer be spinning
Sometimes you tray will eject still but more often than not you will have to take the drive out and shake the bits out. When you are shaking you may find other bits like the small CD laser lens and small pieces of metal - in which case you drive is probably fux0red now....
I did this to my work PC drives.... old Diamond Data and Fujitsu drives that use to piff me off for various reasons
You look around hardware review sites you will come across readers stories of similar experiences where the CD structural integrity has failed and tried to spread itself over the insides of the PC case.
- HeXa
The real reason cd drives arent getting faster is because the demand dosent exist for cd rom drives! Look at the kenwood true
72x drive... it used multiple read heads to obtain that speed. Where theres demand there is innovation. If everyone needed/wanted
a 72x cd rom drive, Kenwood wouldntve stopped making them and other manufacturers would.
I suggest building drives with 8 read heads, all of which spin counter to the Cd at 25x, and the CD at 52x. Then we can burn disks faster then you can swap them in and out of the drive. And can we figure out a way to get my disks to pop up like toast when they're done burning?
The article talks about constant linear velocity (used in the original audio standard) and constant angular velocity drives. It comments how manufacturers like to have CAV drives to quote impressive speeds compared to the CD (audio) standard, but doesn't mention a much more important reason for using CAV: if you used CLV you'd need to wait for a long time (probably seconds) for the spin rate to change and stabalize whenever you seeked from one part of the disk to another.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Contrary to popular belief, plastic doesn't last forever.
:)
Since CD is made up of two layers of clear plastic, sandwitching a thin wafer of metal media inside, the more the CD is aged, the weaker the plastics of the CD become.
And so, the maximum spinning speed for a CD depends on how old the CD is.
I do have some pretty old CDs from the early 80's, and I will NOT put them in my 52X CDROM drive. Unless of course, I want to scrap bits and pieces out of my machine.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Would it be possible to leave the CD stationary, and spin the laser instead?
Since this site has been posted twice, slashdot should be considered as the most used DoS software that's actually in use by actual hackers.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
"I'm givin' the CD-ROM drive all it ken handle, Captain, anymore and the discs will explode!"
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I'm sure I've seen this before. So, I'm sure someone's posted the same before me. The redundancy comes full circle now.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
When web sites hyped-up fast, they explode
I wonder how much force the body can stand being spun around on the spot? That is, before you are violently sick :)
I'm in the process of converting a WGP Autococker into a CD/DVD Launcher - specially flattened barrel, tightened on one side to impart a spin - to launch Compact Disks with a burst of CO2. Although the CD's needed to be loaded by hand, one at a time (up until recently), I can reliably attain ~550 ft/s. This is enough to cleave thick pieces of styrofoam/cardboard or aluminum cans in half... or embed itself into soft wood like Eucalyptus trees. Against harder targets, such as rocks, the rounds simply undergo fragmentation and splinter into tiny plastic chunks. I don't know the effects against animal matter yet, because the contraption is notoriously inaccurate and squirrels are annoyingly fast. :)
At higher velocities (~700 ft/s) the rounds begin to fragment in the "barrel". I'm currently examining other alternatives to increase the velocity, but I guess now I have to take spin to account.
Other notes: I've put together a rudimentary feeder/hopper that now lets me use my CD Launcher in a semiautomatic fashion (and wastes more CO2 per shot)
Solomon
PS: I'm slapping together a solenoid-actuated electric trigger frame (similar to a Sandridge) to convert my paintball^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H CD gun to a fully automatic weapon. I don't know if it will work... yet. (I have given thought to converting an Angel, but I'm not willing to futz with $1300 gun, and I've been doing my own custom internals on 'Cockers for years now.)
I estimate a potential ROF of ~13 CDs/second. (maybe *now* I'll be able to hit that pesky squirrel) My anticipation is that it still won't do any damage to brick walls, bronze statues, and masonry of quality craftsmanship, but will absolutely *shred* old wooden fences, thrown-out sofas, and squirrels.
BTW, I once thought of calling it my Assault Ordnance Launcher, or AOL for short... the idea being that people would soon become afraid of my AOL CDs...
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
OK. The staff can't be perfect, but this is not even close to being all that unique. I remember this story as well.
I suggest the department headings be changed from frivolous titles to useful ones, to help with categorisation. I'd also like to see duplication URLs recorded, as Sircus suggests.
Someone here noted that Slashdot has an option to show all sections. Perhaps editors should have this as a mandatory condition on their own logged-in sessions.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I couldn't imagine a more appropriate use for my spool of AOL CDs.
My 16X DVD-ROM Drive decided it didn't like one of my CD-Rs, so it blew it up on July 4th. I put the CD in to install some stuff (Mandrake RPMs not pirited software) and I heard this nasty *BANG*. I tried to open the drive, but it was of course broken. I pulled out the drive and there was a large shard of CD sticking out through where the aluminum lid met the back of the drive, and I had to *PRY* it out. Then I opend the drive and emptied the CD and bits of drive electronics in the trash, and I'm not covered under warennty.
Oh, and this is a repeat article.
The other answer is to go find a nice, reliable 16X or 8X CD-ROM drive (brand of your choice) and use that instead.
Are there ways to safely "underclock" current drives to limit their rotation speed?
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
It really would be a good idea to ban compact discs from airline flights (if they're going to go so far as to ban things like nail clippers and eye glasse screw drivers). A CD can be broken into two pieces very easily and are still strong enough that either piece could be used to slash someone's throat, wrist, belly.
VERY dangerous.
is that tremedous amount of energy is stored in the disc. Supposed that the disc is spinned very fast but before the break point, and someone stupid enough to stop the spinning(like open the cd tray while the light is on, we all do that don't we), the loosing disc will break out of the case and kill a couple of people nearby.
this is a repost. i read this before. same site i think. sheesh...
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
There goes my plans to turn all those free AOL disks into yoyo's to sell on ebay.
Table-ized A.I.
Will different CD have different break point? It took a hand and a foot to break a traditional transparent CD-R(try it), but those colorful black/blue/red CD will even break when you took it out of its case in the wrong way.
here's the google cache link since its already slashdotted...
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
An angular grinder that actually uses a CD-like abrasive disc revolves some 10 000 rpm. This applies for the smallest ones (110 cm - 125 cm diameter), larger discs tend to be slower, 6 000 - 8 000 rpm so that the edge of the disc won't reach warp speed.
Routers (the real ones, for woodwork) revolve at some 30 000 rpm and the router blades are not larger than one inch in diameter. And these babies are made of very high quality steel and they are expensive.
So, it is actually not very surprising that a CD-size object would break at 30 000 rpm, especially as they are probably made as cheap as possible.
... 30,000 RPM'S (Requests per minute) made the webserver explode.
It is from the Department of Redundancy Department. I know I have seen this before too.
Some people seem to be missing the point on CD's DVD's and other forms of optical storage. Speed is nice... but cheap is better If you need insane speed buy a hard drive. If you want compact and rewritable use flash memory... I got several negative comments about not liking new disc sizes in optical storage a couple days ago...
Update: Yep, it's a dupe...
but we will not take it away, knowing that people would comment to it anyway.
will be one of two things I think:
1. The CD will be spun at 64x or so clockwise. Under that will be a second counter-rotating plane that will contain the laser. With the platters rotating in opposite directions you can break the 30K RPM physical limitations of the media. You can build the mechanism strong enough to do 300x normal CD speed I'd guess. 300 * 64 = 6,000x or ( 2.5GB/s). I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing such a mechanism in hard drives either. The disks i
2. What I think will truely be the big breakthrough will be to not spin the disk or reader mechanism at all. Instead, the drive will use a scanner like method to read the entire CD in to a 700MB buffer in a few seconds. The disk will then sit idle while all requests are served from the buffer. I see this used in a slot loading scheme, so as the disk is drawn in it is read.
The nifty thing about this would be that you could create a CD image in the buffer, change the bugger copy just like a normal disk drive, then eject the physical master and burn the buffer to a new CDR(/CDRW disk.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
My 16X DVD-ROM Drive decided it didn't like one of my CD-Rs, so it blew it up on July 4th.
:)
Celebrating the birth of America with a bang of silicon...What an excellent display of American patriotism by your drive!
Anyway, before playing discs in any drive, make sure it doesnt have any cracks originating from the center. Following this advice will assure that wont happen again.
If the disks exploding at 28,000 rpms is holding back CD speeds and CD speeds are slower than Hard disk speeds, then Hard Disks must be spinning at faster than 28,000 rpms, right? WRONG! Hard Disks spin at 5400, 7200, and now even 10,000 rpms so CD's must be spinning slower than that...so the speeds given are NOT the bottleneck and won't be for quite some time.
What are you, a mouse or do you just have a serious male member size problem?
Anyone with a passing interest in radio controlled airplanes already knows this fact:
Plastic propellers disintegrate at high rpm.
So they use wooden ones. The document (the cached version, sans photos) did not go into great detail about the nature of the material failures, which they claim will be investigated with SEMs, but it would be interesting to use their same setup with same-size components made of other materials. A wooden CD-sized disc, an aluminum one, etc.
Not that CDs should be made of wood, but certainly plastic at high rpms is a compromise between cost and durability.
At what angular velocity would a child (~30kg) explod on a merry-go-round? What would happen if they were to have a CD in their pocket?
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
Good idea, except they'd probably break in portable players with skip protection, as those spin the discs faster than 1x.
Got friends?
Protected disks are designed not to work in anything but a simple, everyday, CD Player. The specs for most all of these (except the esoteric, and walkman style, both of which the RIAA couldn't care about) say they run the disc at 1x only. Unless you're trying to build in shock protection, there's no need to ever spin the disc at over that rate (except maybe for fast forwarding, but I still don't think that's done like this).
Most drives can't have their ripping speed set AFAIK, which shouldn't surprise anyone whose read about what a hack ripping really is anyways.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
hold the CD still, then have the reader spin around real fast? I guess the laser might get distorted though...
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
You're exactly right, it is the data density that matters. The problem with CD media is that the density is stuck so the only way to speed things up is to get the CD spinning faster. Hard drives of the same physical size today compared to those just 5 years ago (usually) have the same number of platters, but the density of those platters has gone up along with the amount of data that can be transferred.
This story was ran a few week back, and was proved a dupe back then because of their is no such thing as a kelvar enforced cd.
And its getting worse these days, saw lots of aopen 40x drives with powdered cd's inside, but also other brands
Yes, and patroticly encouraging the growth of the DVD drive cartel.
And... How DARE you assume I'm American?
Man, I've posted like 5 stories and they've all been rejected. At this rate I have a better chance of going through the database and posting an older story!
I know this is a Troll, and probably has already been mentioned. But just for morbit curiosity's sake, I entered the word CDROM into the search field on slashdot, clicked submit. And what do you know! The duplicate article was #4. FOUR!
This took me all of 5 seconds to check. This
wasn't something about Microsoft that would be buried 10 pages back, no. This shows up at the upper half of the upper quarter of the list of responses to a simple 10 second (I wonder if we did this before) check.
I know dupes are going to happen from time to time. With several editors, its impossible for all of them to know off the top of their heads if the article has been posted before. Even if it were only one person, I still wouldn't hold it against them that much. But some modicum of effort should be taken to at least avoid looking like a complete moron. This means, make sure its not still on the front page somewhere (this includes the older stuff links), make sure you can't find it in the search list with one or two
of the common topics of the article, and perhaps,
if possible, do a quick check on the URL to see if its been mentioned before.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
This is my first post on /. I have a 56x CD-ROM drive in my computer. That computes to an approximate value of 9.856 Mbps, and as such, 650MB would take 1 min 5 sec. IMHO, that is really not bad, although I do prefer my 10/100 Ethernet. I have noticed that it makes a loud whirring noise, and a scraping noise when it spins down. The CDs also come out VERY hot. I have never left a CD in there for long. If 52x can destroy a CD, I just hope the computer's casing can stop any fragments. I guess this puts a whole new "spin" on "fragging"! :)
We're Doomed
Dremels can spin much faster than 30,000rpm. Those motors have a field winding and an armature winding. If you decrease the field current, it causes the armature current to go through the roof. This is called "field weakening" and is a common method to get motors to spin faster. The motor's speed can be expressed as a ratio of armature/field current. The motor's speed is that ratio.
AC motors are tricky to do that with, but one sure way to overclock a dremel motor is by "overclocking" one of those 120VAC inverters. Look for an opamp that generates the clock frequency and the resistor for that RC circuit can be replaced with a potentiometer. You can vary the frequency from 0 to about 400Hz. Higher the frequency, the higher AC motors will sync. Don't go to high on the frequency or the inverter's mosfets will exceed their slew rate. That means most of the energy they are trying to switch will be disapated inside themselves, because they can only switch between the voltage rails so fast. Another resistor on the opamps will adjust the voltage for charging the storage capacitor. This one will have the greatest effect. You can get most inverters to pump out over 200 volts. Use an oscilloscope to track down the inverter's signal generator.
I found a non-overclocked dremel will easily cause the cd's outer tracks to skew. Extreme vibration will be the result as the cd warps quickly. Speed will drop quickly due to this imbalance. Solution: turn up the power!
By making the read heads seek quickly across, and then slowly back, repeatedly, you can make some old mainframe hard disks "walk" across the room :-)
Well if we're going this way, then let's make things simple and go to square discs. Much easier geometry for mechanisms that lack spinning.
You know it's a dup. I know it's a dup. So WHY the fuck did you put it up? Was it so good you just had to print another?
2 28 &mode=thread&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/19/166
So who, besides me, obviously, will get the Redundant/Troll/Flamebait/Overrated for posting this this story? Chris? Oh yeah, yet another good example why authors don't get modded. CUZ THEY'D BE OUT ON THEIR ASS.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They could build stronger CDs. Just a thought.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It's old news, but Sony's attempt to put a stopper on "illegal burning" of CDs was to add an extra feature to it, that made it crash a computer every time it was played. The way this can be prevented is to look on the written side of the cd, and see where the data containing the music had been recorded. A little more to the outside, a line of data featuring the Anti-copy information exists. If you take any old marker and draw over this "feature", the disk will "theoretically" work on computers as well. Utterly pointless.... What next? As was said: Cds that crash and burn when put through more than 1X speed? CDs that crash cd players? CD-players that wear out cds, so you'll have to buy a new one every week? Scary..
...Why they'd go through all the trouble to make a counter-rotating assembly when they realistically could stregthen the disks. But personally, I think they'll stop using CDs before either happens. Not cost effective. I like 2Gb as much as the next guy, but these hyper drives are only going to see the light of day (that's IF they see the light of day) in very high end corperate environments.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
HTML? Sorry, I'm not a programmer.
I'm 10/10 on rejections ^__^ One wonders where they get this news in place of the real news.
..Was thinking we could repost that one on CD maximum speeds."
"let's post a story on that year and half old sub movie, U571..."
"Nah... I want a story on the anniversery of Air Conditioning!"
"I'm kinda dry on stories over here.
"No! U571!"
"Dammit! I was talking first!"
"Boys, boys, boys... Don't fight. We can print them ALL!"
"Hurray!"
You need a FREE iPod Nano
- A giant fan aimed at a heat sink attached to the spindle that grips the CD
- Pressurized CD-ROM drives
- A sticker on the "5x-the-speed-of-sound" drive stating that by using this CD-ROM drive, you agree that the speed of sound is one-tenth the speed the rest of the world claims.
One of the above would be appended to what we know today as a 24x CD-ROM drive.Yep, that's right. I spun my sister around when she was teeny weeny, and I ended up wearing the contents of her tummy. I apologize for not recording the RPM it took to do that.
THE POINT:
SO... TO MAKE OUR SKIES SAFE: only 3 at a time, naked and with hand and feet chained fast to your seat; nothing else in tow. that would about do it.
Hmm... the passengers naked & chained to their seats. Welcome to Bondage Air where the Second Class is REALLY Second Class and the First Class gets deal out discipline to those naughty naughty Second Class riders.
I see a market for this somehow.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
"Oh and they seem to like using Corel CD-ROM discs for their experiment."
I think they had better tested this with 'Red Alert 2' CDs. (You know, the rts-game Red Alert 2.) I know of nine cases where people had exploding Red Alert 2 CDs. Some with such force, that it ripped their CD-ROM drive to shreds. >:(
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
At least it didn't make the stupid suggestion that CD-ROM drives don't seem to be getting faster because they're nearing the speed at which CD's might explode from G-forces.
The real reason for the limited speeds that can be reached with CD-ROM drives is the vibrations in the CD resulting from motion in that speeds. If the CD moves too much, the laster can't read it properly. Hence, the reason why caddy drives used to be popular - the caddy helped keep the CD still, thus allowing the drive to spin it faster.
If you want a faster CD-ROM drive, you'll have to do what they did in this experiment - tighten the CD down so that it is always perfectly coplanar with the plane of rotation.
Zen Research has developed a technology that reads the disk using 7 beams in parallel, achieving high throughput without spinning the disk at ridiculous speeds.
It has been licensed by several companies including Kenwood that used it to produce an amazing 72x drive.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The second, and not so obvious solution is to spin the player in the opposite direction of the cd. Then both can rotate at their maximum angular speed, and the effective angular speed will be the sum of the CD-speed and the player speed. I'm not sure how fast you can spin a cd-player before moving the heads precisely will become a problem, but if you throw enough money at it, I'm sure it's probably close to the speed you can spin a CD at.
On the other hand, I'm relatively happy with my 40x burner. 2-3 minutes for burning a full CD is about as tolerable as floppies used to be. If I want something more from CDs now, it must be safety (never loose data), storage capacity, and being able to use them as a real read-write medium, not something that needs to be "blanked".
The site is slashdotted, so here's a link to the google cachie.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
When CDs are placed in the microwave for over 5 seconds they tend to catch on fire.
Don't move the disc and don't move the laser around. Instead, use a swiveling mirror to direct the laser to the disc from a fixed point. After bouncing off the mirror and the CD, the laser will then go to all sorts of directions, but with a correctly shaped mirror, you can bring it back to one point where you place a sensor. Pretty simple.
Smells like a cool business idea to me...
I believe there was a turntable in the late eighties that did that. The record stayed still while the tonearm tracked linearly from the out side in and rotated the record. Couldn't find anything on google about it though. I think it might have been a Bang & Olufsen.
No reason to spin the lasers, if you put 2 lasers at 2 intervals then you read twice as fast.
3 lasers, three times as fast etc.
Cheaper than moving the laser. But the scanner idea was sweet.
The Case of the Exploding CD-ROM Record
CD-ROM record? as in "A disk designed to be played on a phonograph."? Okay, I'll buy "CD-ROM album". But they didn't use a music album -- they used a Corel disc.
That's it -- a CD-ROM disc. That sounds much better.
What sort of idiots are these people anyways?
I discovered this a few months ago when I attached a cd to a cordless dremel tool (I was really bored) and put it on the higest possible setting (25,000 rpm) and the cd exploded after a few seconds. Really startled my cat, and I'm still picking little pieces of cd out of the most random things in my room.
So CDs "explode" when spun real fast?
Now thats great news! Who woulda thought of that? Those shiny futuristic holo-like plates from the last century? OMFG.
People, anything will explode when spun fast enough, and 30.000 RPM is fast enough for many materials, including most plastics and glasses.
Just ask anyone working around centrifuges.
my
Yes, I know the answer is 'Terrorists hate Americans', but why?
Because we are the near-monopsony buyer of oil, the Middle East's chief export.
Because the majority of us don't practice Islam.
Because we defend the State of Israel.
It makes the terrorists want to use CD shrapnel to hijack an airplane.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Future copy protection warning:
WARNING - illegal cd copy detected - cd will explode in 10 seconds - please wait
gonna start some contests now. which pc is gonna last longer. like the decibel drag racing of cars.
Is this what the CDs did in the game Revolution X?
I remember ready a long time ago when 12x was the norm that CD drive couldn't get any faster without the CD exploding inside the drive. They figured 20x speeds would never happen because of this.
And someone also said something about 640k being enough also IIRC...
I know part of the reason for using small DVDs was anti-piracy (though dvd-rs in that form factor should be available before long, if not already...), but perhaps some stuff in the article relates to the choice of such a small disc. With the small disc, there is a much more consistant speed with a constant rotation rate from innermost to outermost track. And that speed could be close to normal DVDs at the outermost tracks, since it could be spun faster with lower risk and noise... Just an offtopic thought...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What a fucking moron. You know that button at the bottom of the page? S-E-A-R-C-H? USE IT, FUCKTARD!
We've had two CDs go in the last 6 months in my office, both in 50x drives. One was a CDR, the other was an original photoshop CD. In both cases bits flew out of the front of the drive, and they didn't half make a noise! One of the drives work afterwards, despite having bits of plastic knocked off by the exploding disc.
Dangerous if you ask me - if you have a tower case, make sure the CD drive isn't at eye level!
I think we have a cheap new entry for Robot Wars!
i saw this exact same story here a few months ago...
Why is everyone going to all this effort to speed up cd transfer rates. It should be obvious how easy it is to speed the whole mess up. All you need is a strong source of Brownian motion.
A really hot cup of tea poured into an cd player/burner should do it.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We have had 3 different IBM NetVistas eat cd roms that were left in the drive overnight. You would be minding your own buisness, clicking on my computer, you would hear the CD drive spin up and then *BANG!* "Crunch!" that would be all she wrote for the CD drive! If you pressed the eject button it would rain silvery plastic bits all over your desk. IBM has been replacing our CD drives without much question so I assume it is a common problem with their NetVistas.
You should see a cast-iron lathe chuck spun at 10,000RPM. Saw a real wannabe engineer try that in a machine shop once. Can you say centrifugal force? Yeehaww, Cowboy Neal woulda been proud...
"toolmakers have steel balls" - Hank Shimenski
The exhibition? Architecture of the future :-)
You do know, "dupe" means it's a fake, and "dup" means it's a duplicate, right?
A fun experiment is to put a polished, hardened steel rod through the spindle hole, then hit it with a jet of compressed air. If you get the bearing effect just right the CD will spin up to a 10-20krpm and will occasionally disintegrate on the spindle. Mostly though if you let it slip off the spindle it'll hit the ground, stand due to gyroscope effect while the edge melts against the ground enough to get traction, then take off across the room and explode on impact with the opposite wall.
You can also make an air bearing with an orange by cupping your hand just right and blowing compressed air between your hand and the orange. Oranges explode good.
See here for google cached version
gcc: brain.c: No such file or directory
Google Cache
So do kittens and puppies. Clean-up is more of a mess though...
In other news, CDs shatter under high impact. They have a tendancy to melt when exposed to very high temperatures. Oh, and don't try to put them under too much tension or shear either.
Hey, Einstein! What doesn't break when spun fast enough? This is news?!?!
This story sounds like bunk, because of two things. First, if anybody can provide any proof at all of Winchester drives with six foot platters I'd like to see it, since the largest drive I've heard of or worked with is 18 inches across. Second, "forcibly clamped down"? How, exactly? These old drives had brakes on the spindle (the operator would stop them and lift them out with a handle on occasion, which led to another urban legend about a guy who opened the case, and the brake interlock failed, and he put a clamp down on a spinning platter stack and got his arm twisted off), but those brakes were nowhere near strong enough to stop the platters cold, and these were only a foot and a half across.
The truth of this, however, is strange in and of itself. It was indeed possible to drop a platter stack in crooked, such that when you removed the clamp, closed the lid and spun them up the drive housing would start banging around like an out-of-balance washing machine. It was also possible to design seek programs for the step motor (the one that moves the head across the platter) such that you could cause the drive housing to move. With a properly designed progam and a near-felonious disregard for the equipment, you could move a drive housing several feet. I was privy to a contest some time ago where several programmers competed to try to get the drive housing to move to certain places in the lab (using an old, blown-out platter pack, of course, since we really didn't want to be wiping out a good one).
Virg
I've actually had a CD explode in a CD drive! Sounded like a firecracker going off inside the computer and scared the shit out of me. Needless to say the drive was hosed after that.
"It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to just to break a Britney Spears ringtone collection or an AOL beer coaster."
"Sorry guys, but this server is way to small to survive "THE SLASHDOT EFFECT".
:-(
This page will be back online later..."
DOH!!
And I was really looking forward to reading it. Oh well.. bookmarked for later viewing
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
We had one poor lady in our office who was trying to
install a feature of MS Office from her CD-ROM. She stuck the thing in and after about 5 seconds there was a loud bang from the computer. She nearly hit the ceiling when she jumped.
After checking signs of smoke and what not, we opened the CD tray and there was nothing but a shards. It had completely disintegrated into pieces no more than a couple cenitmeters long.
Of course the drive was completely hosed after that. It just made a jingling noise with all the shards in the unit.
Yet another fine M$ product - exploding CD's.
Is it that difficult?
How the fuck is this insightful? I find it to be an offtopic troll. I wish I had moderator access. I would smack down all you geeks like the wino I beat last night.
And You beleived them?
'Ya big dummy...So do your hands.
Is it so hard to copy and paste? Or do you surf with one hand so you can fist Cowboy Neel at the same time ?
times the data transfer minimum.
Oops !
Oh, you need to be using 3D Volume Holographic Optical Storage with 100 year shelf life.
http://colossalstorage.net
The old-style Aluminum-shell SCBA air tanks (used as an oxygen supply for firefighters) are only about 1mm thick...and they routinely carry air at a pressure of 22,000 psi.
Those plastic fragments were able to crack open 1mm thick aluminum shielding! That means that the pressure those fragments applied was well in excess of 22,000 psi! Yikes!
What's this Submit thingy do?
drive shattered his diablo cd. Spun up normally, heard a vibration, then a spftt and a crashing sound, got a read error from windows. Had to pry the tray open with a screwdriver, completely splintered the cd.
It's a well known fact that the universe revolves around ME.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What I would really like to see, is Compact Flash to become more affordable. Sandisk is already making 1gig CP and 2 gig CP has been annonce already. If they could be half as cheap as a CD, it would really be great. Imagine, instead of having this archaic floppy drive, you could have 1 or 2 gig storage in a square inch floppy.
Now, I would use that rather then CD's anytime if it was cheaper...
I'd rather be sailing...
At school, some idiot stuck a cracked-in-half CD into a drive. It shattered in the drive and they had to remove quite a few shards after disassembling the drive completely. (this was the same group that took apart the printer that jammed. They got the printer back together but it jammed worse. They got a note from the tech saying "Disassembled printer and put it back together CORRECTLY. Do NOT take apart again.")
Another time, someone put a music CD into a drive. The drive went BOOM, shot the faceplate across the room, and slowly ejected the remains of the music cd. It was shattered in many pieces.
I've had my experience with exploding CD's in NON lab conditions.
Pi
(Yes, the title is a gratuitous Neal Stephenson reference, thank you)
How long before we see a virus designed to cause physical harm by making a CD explode?
I cant wait for microsoft to read this, so they can explode my XP cd after i install next time.... hmm copy protection gone mad...
last week exployed right in front of my face! That sucked this thing was spinning so fast it sounded like a race car. Umfortunately one of my games was in the ROM.... fortunately the game really sucked but honestly don't ever try and get your cd to run faster than it is b/c fast cd-ROM = BOOM!!!
i read the same: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31369&cid=3378 210
but the replies insist that the scanning would take so long (because of the high resolution) that it would be faster to read off of the cd. also, the scanned image would be well over 650MB
Kick ass, I said I would be redundant and I am.
Now I'm going to say I'm a billionaire and that I drove a Ferrari to work.
Can I be moderated to instant wealth and happiness please?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Actually portable cd players and md players is banned from some airline companys.
That is because they are afraid a terrorist will play Yoko Ono, not because of spinning breakage.
Table-ized A.I.
"... then take off across the room and explode on impact with the opposite wall. "
Or your head!!!..
[alk]
Sorry guys, but this server is way to small to survive "THE SLASHDOT EFFECT". This page will be back online later...
A recent discovery by Homeland Security agents working with the FAA and CIA has determined that CD players have been imported into the US and sold for the last 3 years. These CD players, targeted mostly at teenagers and children, have been specifically modified to accept a RF signal that causes them to increase their rotation speed to 1000x necessary to play a CD.
Agents suspect that US children are being turned into unknowing suicide bombers by having so many modified CD players operating at any time, that the chance that one is in an airplane when the RF signal is broadcasted is nearly 100%.
As a strategic move, ALL CD players and CD's are now being confiscated at airports across the nation. Children possessing this terroristic equipment are being placed into foster care while their parents are detained under the new Patriot Act.
I used to work for tech support at intel and we had a whole batch of CDs that weren't made properly or somthing, and they'd explode in peoples drives! It was great having some dumb ass end user calling "Uhhhmm.. My Cd uhh... exploded, can I get a new one"
Not only that, but funny you should mention Corel CDs - I had Wordperfect 7 explode inside a brand new Dell 32x one day in the office - split into 5 pieces. Luckily, no one was hurt, and we all went out to lunch.
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
I always spin the hard disks faster than the speed of light so that I can go back in time and fix already released code bugs before the product is released.
Works really well.
I had a hard time convincing management to spend the $25,000 on the hight speed hard disks though.
I'm the poster that submitted the orginal link.
/.'d. I wish there was some way to know if a site could handle the traffic, and then submit a google cache instead.
I felt bad the first time the site got
Maybe before submitting a story, people should send an email letting the site know their page might be getting linked from slashdot?
> ]. I know duplicate-URL checking wouldn't help everything
I agree, even having a basic script which checked for duplicate urls would be welcome. Heck, make it per user configurabe.
i.e.
[x] Don't show duplicate stories
Cheers
Don't burners always do CLV when writing? Are the 48x burners multilaser or someting? 48x would be ~25K RPM (about as fast as a 125x CAV reader, if my math is correct), which seems close to/over the limit.
Are the media with higher speed advertised actually sturdier?
--
Benjamin Coates
Here I am, reading the cached article on Google, when my CD-RW drive kicks open.
After I had already leaped across the room and made a barricade out of my mattress, I remembered that I was burning an ISO of RH 7.3.
Oh yeah, I'm cool. =]
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
many many uninformed idiots...
satan! SATAN! 54T4N! s4tAN! 5at4n!
Secondly, it wouldn't apply on the grounds that a cd shooting gun isn't a "firearm" the projectile is propelled without gunpowder, so there isn't as much regulation governing it
Every state has it's own weapons laws. Note they are never called firearms laws, they are "weapon" laws, and are usually written ambiguiously enough to include most types of projectile weapons. Of course, it doesn't matter what the actual device is, if you use it to seriously injure or kill someone, it's considered a deadly weapon. A baseball bat is perfectly legal to own. You can even keep it in your back seat without much hassles from police. Yet as soon as you jump out of your car and pull that bat, it becomes a deadly weapon and you are much worse of for having it.
The CD gun is no different. If he kills the squirrel, he's can be charged with weapons violations (as well as cruelty to animals for not killing them with an approved method of hunting, maybe also hit with hunting out of season and poaching fines). Just as if he'd killed the squirrel by knocking it out of the tree with a paint pellet originally designed for the gun. As long as he doesn't use it illegally or recklessly, he should be ok, but no telling where a cop draws the line when it comes to "recklessly" and arrests him for endangerment.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
HTML?? Programmer?? If anyone calls themselves a programmer because they know HTML, they should be shot. HTML is more like low level word processing.
Obviously then, you haven't taken a Delta ComAir Flight recently then.. The naked part is the only thing that hasn't occured.. (and if that starts happening, then they need to charge for looks.. (I'm sorry, your just TOO ugly to be in first class.. but we have a nice "L" class ticket near the bathroom for you.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
A couple of years ago at Christmas my brother needed a new CD-ROM drive. After looking around, I settled on a new 52x drive from Lite-On and a new game to use in it.
On christmas day we installed the drive and played the game for a few hours. The drive was fast, but it sounded a bit too much like a jet preparing for takeoff. The game would occasionally lock up briefly - something we thought was due to the software, until eventually we heard a funny whining noise followed by a very frightening vibration succeeded by one second of loud banging terminating in one VERY loud explosion. The front of the CD drive was bent down, and bits of flying plastic shot across the room.
We couldn't believe it. Talk about pounding hearts! The drive door wouldn't open, and it was apparant the new drive was toast. I collected the fragments of CD, uninstalled the new drive (which now made a nice "rain stick" rattling noise when shaken), and returned both the game and the drive to CompUSA telling them of our experience. We told them that the fragments flew all the way across the room AFTER ripping open the front of the drive - and still made marks on the wall!
We warned them that the drives were extremely dangerous. Our computer just happens to be mounted at eye level - and my brother just happened to have just moved his chair from that location. The legal implicaitons were clear... After rattling the drive for them and showing the bits and pieces of the game CD, they hapilly refunded the purchase price of both.
An e-mail was sent to technical support explaining what happened, along with the serial number of the drive we had purchased.
We never did get a reply from the manufacturer, but we did return a week later to CompUSA and found the drives had been mysteriously withdrawn from the shelves without so much as a whisper.
We opted to spend the money on a Yamaha multi-pickup drive instead. It was extremely quiet, faster than the 52x drive I purchased originally, and best of all - it didn't throw cd fragment across the room at alarming speeds.
-cwm9
Well one thing they could to to increase the seek time, which is one of the most important factors in drive performance, honestly, ripping a track in about 30 seconds is good enough for me, is including more than one read head, placed on opposite sides of the disc, this would effectevly cut the seek time in half, when the bit of data that it needs just passed the head, it wouldn't have to wait a whole nother revolution, just half of one. (Patent Pending)
I'm not ducking out, but this thread has made a 90 degree turn from the topic only four messages back.
Could someone please mod down this and the last three messages in this thread? It's really just pointless bickering between two people who can't bear not to have the last word.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Call me what you want, its been down all day- here is a google cache of the site...
Y C: www.qedata.se/e_js_n-cdrom.htm+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:UaTCrUMQit
-k
That's what this is for.
People have mentioned that some drives use multiple read pickups rather than high rotational speed, but I've been wondering why we have to spin the media at all. Wouldn't it be possible to read the disk by using some spinning mirrors to rotate the optical path around the CD instead? Perhaps it's a space issue, or a need to keep the pickup close to the CD, but it just strikes me that the technology is limiting itself by following designs based on older technology (like 78rpm records!)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What I found of interest at that site was Jorgen's story (and data) of his UFO Magnetic Field Sensor.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Since the website is down, go here to see a cache from Google: http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:UaTCrUMQitYC: www.qedata.se/e_js_n-cdrom.htm+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
I can attest to the existence of four foot disks. I saw a four foot platter at Lawrence Livermore Labs about 1985. It was on its way to the LLL museum. The drive no longer existed but someone had saved the platter, which was 1/4" aluminum four feet in diameter, leaning against the wall in a hallway. IIRC it was a one megabyte disk, built about 1950. I don't know the rotation speed.
My first programming was on IBM 1130 computers with a 12" 1 MB Winchester built-in disk drive with a single removable platter and one second seek time (and a massive 16K or 32K Core memory!!)
The "washing machines" with 5-platter removable cartridges had 5 horsepower stepping motors, and could definitely walk across a room when a lot of seeks were being done. Some folks resorted to tieing them down.
Someone back then found that the disk I/O signal caused noise on a transistor radio set on the console, and wrote an assembler program that modulated the disk I/O to play music. It even took simple music data (via cards). I don't think this was the first computer music, but it was early.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The cd had looked quite normal, pressed type. I have no idea of how this could be accomplished by software, except by exploiting some bug in hardware and overspinning/prematurely releasing the cd.
You say, "...it'll hit the ground, stand due to gyroscope effect while the edge melts against the ground enough to get traction, then take off across the room and explode on impact with the opposite wall."
As far as I know, the ground is the surface of Mother Earth; you should be able to dig it up and plant things in it and have them grow. However, you refer to walls. Maybe you live in a house with a dirt floor?
Read heads and their drives aren't cheap, I'd expect; I doubt there would be more than one actual head. Multiple beams, maybe.
They use a splitter that creates seven beams from one laser. Apparently each beam has its own photosensor. I don't know much beyond that, though.
Actually, the first hard drives were in a greatly reduced pressure state. You could actually change the platters out. You would spin the disk down and park the heads, release the vacuum, crack open the drive and swap platters. Pump the air back out and you were ready to go. These were used in the pre PC days and the disks were usually about 18 inches accross or so. I actually know a computer that is still functioning that uses those drives. Neat huh?
in theory if you spin anything fast enough, it's own weight will tear it apart. In the case of a HD platter, I'm not too sure, I'd want fragments of steel or glass travelling across my room, let alone at speed
Why not use a grocery-style scanner to speed up access times? You can cover the whole disk with a spinning mirror, and keep the Rpms down at a resonable level.