CD Drive cleaning

[Ian Miller.]

"A Friday Afternoon sort of thought"...

I have found out its a good idea to clean the drive of my DVD player at home and my CD player - they work better.

So I thought should I do the same to the CD drives in the alphservers ? Some of them are 10 or more years old.

Any comments?

[Lokesh_2]

Hi Ian,

You can do that.

Anyway, unlike your CD player, your alpha remains in computer center which is a dust & moist free environment. So, this hardly needs cleaning.

Thanks & regards,
Lokesh Jain

[Ian Miller.]

your alphaservers may be in a clean datacenter, mine are in many different environments. I think I will try it - some of them are being a bit troublesome about reading CDs espically CDR I have written.

[Antoniov.]

Ian,
I cleaned some old CD drive od AS400; it was simple and they work fine again.
I powered off system, extracted drive from bay, removed dust with vacuum cleaner (low power) then softly cleaned.

Antonio Vigliotti

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Ian,

the vacuum cleaning technique should definitly work. I think there are also cleaning kits you can buy available. If you go for one of these, check if they are for audio drives or PC drives. Since the acceleration is considerably different between an audio only and a data drive I would suggest to stick with a data drive to avoid potential problems.

Greetings, Martin

(P.S. While the servers I use for the company are certainly in a "clean" datacenter, the same does not necessarily hold for my own ones ;->