Scratching Xbox 360?

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