Finally, the head has to switch on the laser, servo onto the track, verify that it's in the right place, and read the correct blocks into the drive's buffer - something that an audio CD player has to do continuously for an hour and a quarter at a time. Next in line is a seek where the head has to be moved across the disc surface, to find the correct place on the continuous spiral track that CDs use the head transport mechanism is optimised for very fine movements and isn't very good at moving long distances. Probably the most severe form is a start-stop cycle which stresses the spindle motor, its mountings and bearings, and the friction pad coupling it to the disc. The key, I think, is that there are several very different forms of mechanical wear in a CD-ROM drive. It certainly is true that Crash Bandicoot did rely on streaming data from the CD whenever the player moved through the level the whole level simply wouldn't fit in RAM. While this mostly answers the basic question, it leads to the obvious question of why. So, without some useful related data, I'd put these numbers into the distant memory category, with no real world meaning.įirstly, I haven't found any anecdotes of Crash Bandicoot causing premature drive failure in PlayStations. Assuming that such a screen change will happen every 10 seconds, 120,000 hits would end up being like more than 300 hours of play - about a year by playing an hour a day, or still 8 weeks of daily 8 hours play if payed to do so :)) Did they really think it would take that long to finish that game? The cited text can be read as if this may mean each access of the drive, which happendes whenever the scene changes - like a new level or screen. So what about the mentioned 70,000 'hits'?
CRASH BANDICOOT CD IMAGE FULL
Unless a particular drive ends up in the 16-percentile of standard distribution this guarantees a full year of playtime. That's like playing for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 2.5 straight years. For now it may be safe to assume that Mitsumi wasn't in the highest class of reliability :)ĥ,000 hours of usage are quite a lot for a single game. After 2000 these times walked up to more than 100,000 hrs. A typical early 90s drive, like a Mitsume 2x drive had a 5,000 hours MTBF at 100% duty, while a late 90s 12x drive, like the CRMC-FX240, was rated at 50,000 hours power on with 40% duty (equalling 20,000 hrs at 100%).
Lets try to see what it could mean in relation to real world numbers.ĬD-Drives are usually not rated in 'hits' but MTBF hours, like most machinery, often amplified by duty percentage. The whole setup doesn't give much information. The data here is a bit unclear what the mentioned measurement of 'hits' is about and where the percentage of 5 or 50 comes from. Was the rating pessimistic by a particularly large margin? Did Sony switch to a more durable model of drive? Did they in fact eat the cost of replacing a bunch of drives without connecting it to Crash Bandicoot?ĭid Crash get away with it because no one else thought of constantly reading the drive that way? Or is it the case that other developers tried, and Sony smacked them down? Did all the Crash sequels do the same thing, or did they figure out a less drastic solution for Crash 2? So what happened? This seems like much too big a deal to not follow up! Given that Crash and its sequels sold millions of copies, even if the rating was to 5% failure probability instead of 50%, it seems hard to imagine hundreds of thousands of broken CD drives being just forgotten. Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.” Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did.
Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling.
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