Why does my optical drive sound like a vacuum cleaner?

I was playing Roller Coaster Tycoon, and I popped the CD into my LG SCSI CD/DVD-RW drive, and when it spun up, it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I was worried my disc was going to shatter, the sound overpowered everything and I had to turn up my speakers pretty loud to hear anything.

Any ideas what it might be? It's just not this disc, but this is the loudest it's gotten. I've tried googling but got mostly stuff on MacBooks.

 

CD and DVD spin speeds have increased dramatically over the last 15 years.

Now it is a mechanical fact that the faster you spin something the better balanced it has to be.

So if you take an older disk made (balanced) to be spun at 4x speed and put it into a 52x machine I'm not suprised it wobbles.

Once you start overspinning unbalanced disks this puts excessive strain on the drive mechanism an eventually it wobbles all types of disk. I have an elderly Optiplex where this happens.

Some suppliers create their cd's on the cheap and produce poorly balanced cd's with equipment etc.

Hope this helps.

 

Thank you. So if I find a way to slow it down, it should go quiet? Because I got on my hands some programs which should slow it down.

 

Well if you try and it helps, you will know which way to go.

I always try to keep some older drives for older disks. I find that if I definitely want to read a disk with as little error as possible, it is better run slowly, as all drives and disks produce reading errors - an leave it up to the correction software to cope.

Let us know how you get on, and which sofware you use.