Exploding CD?

Someone I work with was telling me that a CD she put in her (older) disc drive the other day exploded into pieces. I was just wondering how common this was and how this could have happened.

lol i love mythbusters, they ran a diesel engine on used fry oil how cool is that. the hydrogen fuel cell didnt work tho... i wish i got that channel lol
anyways, yea the exploding cd isnt very likely. nothing even touches the surface while its in the drive because it just spins and it uses a laser to read it. thats why its called an optical drive.

I have read that CDs that are cracked around the center hole can shatter if they spin too fast... I've not actually seen it happen, though.
Tom

Anything that spind at high enough speeds will eventually be destroyed. If you spin a bearing at speeds in excess of 50,000rpm it will all come apart. The cd doesnt have to TOUCH anything to blow up, just spin to fast to stay together.

Centrifugal force will do that, although you need either a very fast rotation speed or a very crappy disk. Or both. I have never known this to happen though.

It could have been a mechanical failure such as trying to eject the disk while it was still running on the drive spindle.



Starman*

I've had it happen with one computer i've received for repair, and heard about it many times. It's definitely quite possible, but fairly unlikely.