[TriLUG] cdrom: does pushing the tray in damage them?

[Mark Shuford]

Pushing it in to start closing is the way every tray loading CD drive behaves as far as I have observed since the mid-early 1980's. This going all the way back to a couple of old Denon and Sony systems (audio, of course).

Now, I'll also mention that the Sony, eventually, exhibited the "tray won't stay in" problem that you mention. And a friend's Sony (exactly same model) broke even before mine. (Thus began my dis-illusion with Sony products...)

I've not run into a broken tray on a computer CD drive... yet.

My belief is that those that break are due to bad design for production (read, we made it with a bit cheaper materials/strength-at-this-point than the engineers said to) rather than that they are not engineered to work by pushing in the tray.

mds 


On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:58:58 -0400
Brian Henning <brian at strutmasters.com> wrote:

> I'm no expert, but by all counts, I can say that pushing the tray in a 
> bit (and letting the motor take over) /shouldn't/ damage the drive.  Now 
> if you shove it all the way in way faster than the motor would move it, 
> you're probably causing unnecessary stress on the closure mechanism, but 
> otherwise, I believe they're designed to behave that way -- they have a 
> position sensor on the tray for (apparently) exactly that reason.  If it 
> detects the tray moving inward, it kicks in the motor and finishes closing.
> 
> ~B
> 
> 
> Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> > My last two cdrom drives have demised by the tray not staying in (it 
> > just pops out again). From where I sit, the button is underneath the 
> > tray, so I just push the tray in. Then the other day I pushed the tray 
> > in and it popped back out again. On riffling through my hardware stash, 
> > I found the last cdrom drive with a note "tray won't stay in". So this 
> > has happened to 2 drives. I only use them very occassionally, I'd expect 
> > I've had less than 50 insertions on the last drive, which might be 
> > 2-3yrs old.
> > 
> > Is this just one of those things, or does pushing the tray in damage the 
> > cdrom?
> > 
> > Thanks Joe
> > 
>