Is it possible for a cd to damage optical drive?

M

michael8881

New Member
I burned a cd and was listening to it when I noticed it start to skip. I looked at the bottom of it and noticed that there was a small deformity on the cd. I was wondering if that could've scratched my lens when it was burning or playing it. It seems to work fine but I want to know for sure. Can a scratch on the lens reduce the quality of the drive or do disk drives either work 100% or not at all.
 
If a lens is somehow scratched by some debris caught up in the drive that will have a major impact since an optical drive emmits a lazer light and reads the reflections off of a disk. It doesn't have direct contact like read heads seen in hard drive that lightly go over the magnetic surfaces of a drive's platters. An optical drives uses the emitter and optical scanning lens for read/write activities. A disk with defects will of course cause problems for the reading of data from it.
 
The deformity? That would have to have some hard sharp edges in order to scratch a lens up. If some debris was caught or stuck to the disk then that might scratch up a lens while the disk was being run in the drive. Something with jagged edges would be far more likely. The bad spot in the disk is the reason for bad playback. Have you tried other cds to see if you still see any skips or just that one disk?
 
I watched a dvd today and it seemed to work fine. I know that the defromity was the reason for it skipping I was just wondering if a small bump on a disk could scratch your lens or if it's hidden away well enough to not be scratched.
 
Since a disk just about floats in the drive any large bump would probably see it stick rather then turn while there. The surface on a lens is what you see on just about any led meaning that type of plastic material. You could end up seeing some abrasion on the lens for that reason with continued bumping against it from warped cds/dvds. The fact that the dvd played ok is a sign that the lens is still intact fortunately. Now dump the bad disk before...???!
 
Use a lens cleaner occasionally and make sure not to stuff a disk in that's got something stuck on it and you should be alright until the eventual wear takes it's toll.
 
yup, a hard drive is easily damaged if it encounters vibration while reading/writing

that's why laptops have such a high hard drive failure rate
 
The read-write heads in hard drives actually rest lightly on the surface of the platter there until the spinning starts when you powerup a system. Then the air flow is what keeps that suspended just a little bit above but real close to the disk itself. In optical drive the cd/dvd is the disk that spins there unless warped enough to see it bind. The lens being the read-write type of head there never touches anything since it is not dependent on air flow to lift it up. That remains stationary height wise while traveling back and forth from center to edge of the disk. Divide 1mm by 1000 x 3 = 3 nanometers for the averge gap seen for hard drives.
 
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