I was just watching an episode of the show mythbusters that I taped. They were investigating a story of a guy who claimed a CD had exploded in his drive, and destroyed the drive. Sounded a little far fetched I thought. They brought in the facts- a standard 52x drive can spin a disc up to 30,000RPM with the outer edge spinning at 474Mph. Whoa! So they subjected a series of discs to torture- sun, chemicals, rough treatment and one in the microwave. They tried each in the 52x drive spun them up to max and nothing. They then realised the drive wasnt getting max velocity, so they built a simulator using a router that spun at 30,000RPM. Bingo roughly teated discs started explosively shattering. They took a brand new untouched disc and spun the router up to higher speeds, no matter what at over 30,000RPM the discs would shatter, showing that 52x was pretty much it as far as speeds will go for drives. The funny thing was when they put the drives case over the simulator it devastated it. They also created a replica of human skin and flesh in which shrapnel from the disc embedded up to two inches.

Has anyone had a strange killer computer experience they wish to share?

A bloke i know picked up a tower and sliced his finger open causing blood to gush out all over a customers house (he was taking the unit away to be fixed) if youve ever seen the christmas episode of 'bottom' it was abit like that so im told. ive had a few knuckle scrapes from fans but nothing serious.

I had a electric shock from my old hard drive

My mother-in-law was playing the old Carmen Sandiago game and she says the cd exploded in the drive and fry's try to argue that she put cd in wrong..............now come on aint that common sense how the cd goes in?

Mythbusters, those two are fun and it's instructive.

They are also destructive. I liked the one where they checked out insect foggers and exploded a house.

a lot of old people i've met don't know wich way the cd goes in my mom always asks me when she's putting a cd in a drive...

on topic

I think I read about something similar on blizzards site that some of their games had some cd reading routines that kept the cds spinning at max speed for extended periods of thime and could cause the disc to explode... *off searching*

they musn't have had anything to do as an exploding cd is old news and confirmed by many

watched the show for the first time a couple of days ago, it was quite funny when they were trying to see if people could get stuck on airplane toilets.

I sold a 56 x cd rom to a friend and a month later I had to take the drive back to the supplier. He would not believe that the cd rom shatterd the cd.

I searched the net and printed a test to show him that the actual speed that most new cd's would spin safely at is 24000rpm.

He swoped out the drive.

My friend sliced his finger picking up his comuter. I just laughed..

And my mum's friend, had a friend that had a slot loading CD drive.. when he pressed the eject button, it didn't stop spinning, causing it to shoot out and hit the wall. He got some bits stuck in his leg.

I've always been an avid reader/contributor of cdfreaks & I research before buying drives ,,, hence have avoided potentially fatal experiences with optical drives