Scratches on discs caused by XBox 360

[Tim Dog]

I read about it this morning in the newspaper and I thought you should know. The following quote is not taken from the newspaper but a site related to it.

 

 

 

 

In the recent months rumors have cropped up all over the internet that some of Microsofts Xbox 360 consoles cause problems: a lot of users claim that the console actually damages game discs and renders these discs useless. The Dutch television program Kassa asked us to investigate these problems and report on our findings in the episode aired on the 24th of january.

 

A bare XBOX 360

 

As not everybody watches this program but also to share our findings with the rest of the world we have compiled this article that describes the problem and what we think causes it.

 

The problem

 

As stated in the introduction quite a few users have been complaining about the fact that their console scratches the gamedisc when they are used in the Xbox. This scratching seems to be linked to consoles that use a drive made by manufacturer TSST, as we did not find any evidence of the same problem occuring in consoles that use the Hitachi DVD drive. It is easy to recognise which drive you have, the trays are shaped differently and the Hitachi drive has two small holes in the tray, just behind the silver front. The TSST drive does not have these holes.

 

The editors of the "Kassa" TV program sent us a Xbox 360 that suppposedly had the problem of damaging the game discs, the ownerr had indicated that this particular console had already scratched a few of his discs.

 

When looking at the damaged discs of the Xbox owner it is clear that the only way that this could have happened is in the Xbox DVD player, as the scratches are perfectly round and thus cannot be caused by careless handling of the disc itself. If this would have been the case the actual scratches would not follow the round pattern of the disc, but would be completely random.

 

Rounded scratches on a disc, in this case a disc we used in our lab .

 

The nature of the scratches causes the problem as well, as a random scratch will not have a huge impact on the disc itself as all data is written in a circle, and when you just miss a few bits due to a random scratch, error-correcting algorithms can solve the problems most of the time. When the damage is in the same form as the data is written to the disc this means that a lot of successive data is lost and this can not be corrected at all. Even a slight scratch like this can render an expensive gamedisc completely illegible and therefore useless.

 

Reproducing the problem

 

The scratches on the discs we received from compaining Xbox customers appeared in different places, so not just on the outsode or on the inside; this would indicate that one of the parts of the moving reading head is causing the problem. We have tried the Xbox in question both horizontally as vertically placed and used more than one disc, but we could not reproduce the scratching as long as the Xbox was placed on a solid surface. All our discs were read perfectly and came out without a scratch, even moving or nudgng the console lightly did not cause any scratching.

 

After this initial test we put several layers of tape on one side of a DVD-R disc, making this disc thicker and heavier on one side thus causing the complete console to go off balance. This would, according to the theory, cause the disc to touch parts of the DVD reader that it should not touch and cause scratching.

We created an unstable disc with sticky tape.

 

As we expected the disc caused the console to vibrate strongly, even the table we placed the console on started moving when we tried to play this disc. However, even with this unstable disc we could not get the same problem of disc scratching we have seen earlier, the disc played as normal and came out of the drive without any markings. We did find that an Xbox that is placed horizontally does not vibrate as much as one that is upright. This is easily explainable as the drive in the console can work both horizontal and vertically, however it does perform better and was primarily designed to be used in a horizontal position.

 

Deep scratches

 

Even with a highly unstable disc no sign of any markings so we decided to take things a bit further. When playing a disc we picked up the console and moved it quickly from vertical to horizontal and back. This caused a horrible scratching noise from the console and when opening the drive the disc showed clear round scratches. It is obviously not the way to handle your Xbox, and the manual even clearly states that the console should not be moved while in operation. This is a clear case of "Don't try this at home!".

 

To be able to see where the disc touches the actual drive works we colored a disc with black marker pen en played this disc while moving the Xbox. When we opened the drive again we could clearly see markings on the outer ring of the DVD tray, which is normal as this ring is meant to handle instabilities in DVD discs used.The outer rings of DVD's normally do not hold data anyway, so this would not cause major problems. On the rest of the tray we could not find any markings whatsoever, meaning that the tray was not responsible for the damage done to the discs.

 

Marked discs to show where the fault appears

 

Inside the XBOX 360

 

To find out what does casue the scratching we had to open up our console en took out the DVD drive. The drive in question is one of TSST (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology), as all other drives used in the Xbox seem to have no problems with scratching.

 

The console we researched had the TSST TS-H943 drive

 

The drive in our model was a TS-H943 TSST drive, we opened it up and examided the inner workings to see if we could find the cause of the scratching and looked for traces of marker pen.

 

These traces were fairly swiftly found, they were on the actual lens of the laser pickup. A magnifying glass shows multiple traces of erosion, some with black marker pen on them from our experiment. This proves that the scratching is caused by moving the Xbox and the lens touching the discs because of this movement. On the internet we did see other cases of other parts of the laser pickup causing the scratches on the discs, and our example showed slight damage on other places of the laser pickup as well. However the lens showed the most clear markings, and the lens does actually potrude above the rest of the laser pickup.

 

Closeup of the lens, you can clearly see the markings

 

Different angle that shows the marker pen and the damage on the lens

 

Avoidable?

 

Obviously moving the console around while playing is not the way to handle your Xbox, and we can not accuse the machine of damaging disc when used normally. We were curious to see if PC DVD players had the same issues when you moved them, so we took a DVD drive, a TSST SH-D162, and moved it around vigurously while playing a disc. The results were astonishing; the drive did make a lot of noise and play back was very choppy, but we could not find a single marking on the disc that we used in this test. We did this test more than once, but we could not scratch a single disc this way.

 

Two drives by TSST: The Xbox drive on the left, the SH-D162 PC drive on the right

 

Cushions

 

We had to open the SH-D162 drive to find out why this drive did not cause scratches, where the Xbox drive does. Looking more closely it is quite simple; The SH-D162 drive has tiny cushions placed around the lens, so that the lens surface can never touch a DVD disc. As the Xbox drive does not have this precautionary measure, it is possible for a lens to touch the discs and cause the scratching.

 

The SH-D162 drive has got small cushions that protect discs from being scratched.

 

Conclusion

 

When researching claims that the Xbox 360 DVD would scratch game discs we were not able to reproduce these claims and can not prove that this actually happens. Even a disc that was made instable on purpose would not scratch as long as the console was handled normally. We did find out that the Xbox operates better when it is placed horizontal, so an important tip is to lay the Xbox down if possible and do not leave a disc in the drive when moving your console.

 

The fact we could not reproduce the problem of consoles randomly scratching discs does not disprove the claims that it might happen, but we could not prove that it does in our tests.

 

We can confirm that the Xbox 360 will cause scratches on discs when the console is moved about when playing, however the manual does state that the console should not be moved when in operation, and any form of warranty will be wavered when you do this.

Xbox lens on the left, the version with cushions out of the SH-D162 on the right.

 

The curious thing about the whole story is the fact that there are solutins to the problem, as the PC version of a TSST drive, the SH-D162 does have small cushions around the lens to prevent scratching. It is unclear what the official statement of Microsoft will be about the consoles that are damaging discs, but we would like to ask Microsoft to use the small cushions around the lens in a new revision of the Xbox 360, like in the TSST SH-D162.

 

Edited April 13, 2007 by Tim Dog

[Grandthefter]

I've got a scratched disk too, but its not the xboxs fault - it doesn't just scratch things randomly. I ended up knocking the xbox while playing dead rising, now i have no dead rising.

[GTA3Freak-2001]

Yeah I had my 360 do that too one or two discs, luckily the drive ended up failing and so MS repaired it and gave me the better Hatachi drive and its been fine since. My Xbox did this too as it had the dreaded Thompson drive which caused many DRE's, infact even my PS2 suffered this kind of problem.

[JGJONES]

I have this problem too and it has p***ed me off so much.

My dad was playing Gears Of War and then suddenly when he got to the later levels it stopped working. It works fine up until when we go to play that level. Also the 1st level and the one we are currently up to don't work. Why did microsoft make diffrent drivers!!!. Talk about stupid! I don't play my 360 much now because i am afraid it will scratch Test Drive : Unlimited , PGR3 and NFS Carbon. Does anyone think if i went to a store that does repairs that they would be willing to change my 360's driver to the one that doesn't scratch my games.

 

P.S. My 360 is UK version and i have UK version's of my games because i'm in England, UK.

[MasterPants]

It only happens when you move the console when the game is playing, because if you do, you will hear a sound like nails on a chalkboard and you take your disc out, and theres a HUGE circular scratch around the entire disk, so just don't move your xbox when playing it. That's why I don't keep mine standing up, because my dumb ass friends ruined so many games of mine from knocking it over. But yeah that's it pretty much.