Mini-CDs may damage your computer’s optical drive

This arti­cle was first posted on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=255 

‘Tis the sea­son… for minia­ture CD and DVD disks. A friend of mine received a minia­ture audio CD in the mail, and decided to try it in their computer’s tray-loading CD drive.

It never played. In fact, the minia­ture CD is prob­a­bly jammed in the drive between the spin­dle the tray. There are two pos­si­ble fixes:

1. Remove the desk­top computer’s front panel and press the balky drive’s emer­gency eject but­ton. This is a flat black but­ton that is built into the front of the opti­cal drive. Usu­ally this but­ton is hid­den behind the computer’s plas­tic or metal case. If the minia­ture disc isn’t jammed into the spin­dle, and it’s rest­ing on the drive tray, it may come out when the tray is ejected.
2. Replace the drive.

Sadly, I think the drive will have to be replaced. Minia­ture discs tend to jam a slid­ing drive tray.

A standard-size opti­cal disc is 120 mm wide. Minia­ture discs are smaller, and they work because the data track or spi­ral of a com­pact disc start from the inside of the disc, near the plas­tic spin­dle hole.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, a standard-size com­pact disc has a data spi­ral that is 5.38 km or 3.5 miles long!

I’ve seen minia­ture discs that are shaped like busi­ness cards. In fact, I picked up a disc from the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency last week. The disc pro­moted job oppor­tu­ni­ties at the Agency. Per­haps the disc itself was an intel­li­gence test!

I’ve also seen hard­ware devices that shipped with mini CDs. The CD con­tained some device drivers.

There are some dig­i­tal cam­eras that use minia­ture discs to record pho­tos. Sony’s Mav­ica line is the model I’ve seen most often.

Never ever try to insert a minia­ture opti­cal disc into a slot drive. This is the style of drive found on most Apple com­put­ers, and I’ve seen this style on sev­eral Windows-based laptops.

There is no drive car­rier tray at all, and these slot dri­ves are build to accept standard-size opti­cal discs. The eject mech­a­nism in the drive usu­ally can­not push a minia­ture disc out of the drive.

The only fix is replac­ing the drive, and that’s not cov­ered under Apple and other manufacturer’s warranties.

Tagged as: Apple, hardware, storage