A damaged/bad CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc in your computer can cause it to crash or lock up

There was a machine in the office with a large Windows software RAID-0 array that would drop out of the system on rare occasions and immediately pick back up. Upon reviewing the event logs, there were lots of errors related to “atapi” which is usually the CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or BD-ROM drive having some kind of issue, and in this case it definitely was! It turned out that a particular action taken by the user was triggering attempts to read a bad CD that the user had tried to recover information from and left in the drive after giving up. Whenever the computer touched this drive AND was under a heavy disk load, the CD read problems would cause all of the disks in the RAID-0 array to time out, drop, and immediately come back online. This was treated by the system like a “surprise removal” event, so things would work fine afterwards until the next time this combination of activity was performed.

All S.M.A.R.T. statistics indicated that the drives were okay. One CD ejection later and the computer stopped having disk problems!