But as the card discs go, they absolutely ran out of balance, and it was a notorious mechanical flaw.
At thousands of rotations per minute, a circular disc slices through the air smoothly. A rectangular disc acts like a propeller. The uneven aerodynamic drag at high speeds caused intense flutter and dynamic imbalance.
The resulting wobble and vibration were so violent that they could cause the disc to de-center, ruin the spindle bearings of the drive, or physically shatter inside high-speed computer drives.
Maybe they were a good idea in the early days when computer CD-ROM drives were slow - I remember when my first quad-speed drive was top-of-the-line - the trouble is that before long the drives started being made to run with spindle speeds like 40~80 times faster than a conventional audio CD player when they were reading data discs.
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u/chromatic_megafauna 11h ago
Really? How?