My Asus drive destroyed a blank CD

I simply put a CD in my drive, it tried to read it, but failed. It tried again and again and then suddenly there was a bang and I see this fragment sticking out of my drive. Such drives generate quite high forces in the disk. Small flaws commonly found in blank CD's then cause the disk to disintegrate. See http://www.paintbug.com/cdexplode/ for some interesting experiments on the limits of drive speeds.