I have not used CloneCD for a very long time because it destroyed two of my previous burners. I was wondering if anyone else out there has had similar problems or if it was just random dumb luck that it should happen to me. The symptoms were similar to when I rip 100 audio cd's to MP3 in a day the difference being I only had to run CloneCD for one copy. My read speeds dramatically decreased and on the burners it fried were 12.10.32 and after using cloneCD they wouldn't burn faster than 4x without having severe buffer underrun issues. It was like cloneCD wore out my CD-RW's in one disc. Unfortunatley I am unaware of which versions I was running back then but it was about 2000-2001

Anyone know or have any other related experience?

Using software to destroy hardware is near-impossible. I have never heared of CD burner software destroying drives. You -CAN- get driver issues with CloneCD causing the drive to have trouble reading things, however, physically destroy it? I doubt it...

That's what I would've thought too but I reformat my system partition at least once a month and I checked out everything that I could have gone wrong at the time. I have no idea how exactly it could've happened unless the drives themelsves were faulty but the chances of two faulty drive purchases in a row are very slim. Where the symptoms were extremely similar to common wear and tear I was wondering if cloneCD alters the voltage levels of the drives at all.

It -can- not alter the voltage in any way. If the drives were of the same vendor and type, report back to the vendor, there may be a firmware error instead...

I would have thought that software couldn't physically damage a machine until I read an article about CD burners and certain CDs, if the Cd is slightly warped (just a slight wobble, not enough to affect playback) and gets scratched, it is possible for the CD to shatter and break out through the front of the drive.

The strange thing about CD drives in computers is that the software dictates the speed of the drive and if the drive speed is high enough, a faulty disk can shatter, this was known before but achieving enough velocity to break out of the front of the machine was something that engineers hadn't accounted for.

As far as I can remember a guy in New Zealand got some bits of CD embedded in his shoulder.
I'l try and track doen the article.

Ah yes. But that happens only at extreme rotation velocities, above 40x reading speed, and with poor quality CD's. Plus, it's a hardware failure, and has nothing to do with software...

Oh, and limiting the CD drive's speed is quite possible... Software tries to get maximum speed, if it cannot attain that, drive will spin down.