Spin Me Round

I was busily backing up my DVD movies two days ago. I left my fileserver to encode and burn the DVD for me and went to take a shower. I came back about an hour later (the shower wasn’t that long), and noticed that the DVD burner tray was open, but there was no disc in the tray.

I must have forgotten to load a disc, I thought to myself. I put in another dual-layer disc and tried to close the tray.

The tray went about halfway in and then spat the disc back out. Weird. I pushed the tray in again, out the disc came.

I squinted into the drive and noticed a piece of white foam was sticking up where it probably shouldn’t be. Maybe the disc got too hot and got stuck in the drive? I grumbled and shut my fileserver off. I pulled the DVD burner out and unscrewed it, giggling at the “BREAKING SEAL VOIDS WARRANTY” sticker on the bottom.

Sure enough, there was a DVD trapped inside, along with the white foam disc (presumably to cushion the laser head) and a black rubber band that is probably used to connect the drive opening/closing gears.

I dug the DVD out and it was scratched more than my back during the heat of passion:

I thought about trying to reattach the foam disc and the rubber band, but the disc looked pretty jacked. I also figured that if my drive broke down under normal conditions, I was sure it would fail again with already tweaked parts. I took these pics for posterity and then junked the drive.

Luckily, the replacement drive is about 1/3 the cost of the original. I also needed an excuse to buy a 16-port switch and some CAT5 cable from the fine folks at Newegg.com. Hopefully my replacement gear will arrive by Wednesday this week.