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More about CDs exploding in highspeed drives

Written by Lasse Penttinen @ 18 Aug 2002 12:23 User comments (1)

Recently there has been quite a bit of talk about the maximum speed that a compact disc can handle. Recently when Plextor annouced their new drive they built in a "speed lock" that the user needs to unlock to use speeds above 40x.
Now the Freaks have a nice sample of what can happen to a CD when the going gets too fast.

The IL-2 Sturmovik CD was in an AOpen 52x CD-ROM and suddenly a huge 'bang' .. it exploded and shattered probably into more particles a modern videocard can render realtime. The front of the CD tray even blew off and the CD .. shattered to pieces.

CDFreaks.com

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1 user comment

119.8.2002 13:43

52x - A bit too fast ;-) There are high speed drives (over 40x) which use multiple lasers to read multiple tracks at once. This means that the CD only needs to spin at a fraction of the speed compared with a single laser drive, i.e. the typical 40x. That 52x must have been a single laser drive and I'm sure that the CD was spinning well over 10k RPM before it shattered!

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