Last updated on December 2, 2008
Not long ago John pointed me to a sale at Woot for a device which destroys CDs or DVDs. Having a huge stack of discs to dispose of and costing only $4.99 (+$5 shipping) I decided to order one. Today my Sanyo “The Claw” CD/DVD Media Destroyer arrived.
Yes, that’s exactly what it says on the box, not far from the part which shows that it is Compact Disc and DVD compatible. Too bad it doesn’t do Blu-ray.
After eating some dinner I set to work processing discs, and with a ~2 second cycle time per disc I was able to get through 163 discs (one after another) before The Claw stopped working, with a FreeBSD 3.2 CD stuck in the drive. Thankfully it was just a thermal shutdown, and after allowing it to rest in the garage for half an hour I was able to continue processing the discs, chewing through the remaining 70 or so in no time flat.
The Claw works by pinching the media between two spiked rollers, which put a bunch of small indentations all over both sides of the disc while at the same time somewhat deforming the plastic so that the disc isn’t really flat nor round. A test audio CD made a bunch of horrible noises when placed in a top load radio, so I can only imagine what putting one of these discs in a normal reader would do.
Here is a detailed image of what The Claw did to a NT 5.0 beta CD and here’s similar damage to a CD-R, including delamination of the foil. Here is a 600dpi scan of a processed CD-R showing the typical damage pattern.
Now that I’m done processing that giant stack of discs I’m not sure what to do with it. I could relabel it as a DVD cleaner and drop it off a the Salvation Army, but that’d just be mean.
If you’re looking to recycle the processed discs, they can be taken to the SOCRRA drop-off center on Coolidge – see socrra.org for hours and location info. It’s supposedly for residents of a few cities in Oakland County, but there’s never anyone there looking for proof of residency.
jimbotr0n: Oh… really. That’s interesting. I wasn’t aware that they’d recycle them. I don’t actually live in Oakland County, but I might be able to make that happen. I’ve got them all in one box right now and hopefully I can get down there to drop them off. Or, maybe I could ask someone to do me a favor and take them off my hands…
you can use the CDs to build a truncated icosahedron.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dubster/2100950180/
Dubi: That looks pretty nifty, I just don’t know what I’d do with it afterwards.
I’d be happy to drop them on our next trip (we end up taking plastic bags and other non-curbside pickup items there once a month or so). Dump ’em in your car next time you head to IPM and let me know…