Whatever happened when the PS2 caused this during its launch? I worked at a video store that rented out the systems and we lost so much product. In addition to that, the "disk read error" was a nightmare. It's a good thing our customers were ravenous for the system as it definitely paid for itself in that time. I just feel bad for anyone who actually bought one of those systems for themselves at launch.

That is truly shocking. 

I just wanted to drop by and say congrats on getting VGC's 200,000th thread

I had the first generation of 360 as well as the later 360s. Never a problem with scratched discs since I find it very unnecessary to more the console while I'm gaming :).

congrats on making thread 200k

Doesn't matter if it only affected .4 % of systems. It's still 200k. Pharmaceutical companies have to pay out to families when their product really messes up people. It's a small amount of people but still at fault.

MY stories the opposite . i had problems with my first 360 it would load up ok and then you would get juttering along with a loud grinding sound , upon ejecting I dicovered the outer the disc scratched starting from the outer edge to about a third of the way across and the scratching went from light to deeper the further across the disc you looked untoil it ende with a ring shaped gouge .

I never move my consoles while they are on and they are well ventilated , the surprising thing was after the first scratching , I tried other discs and they played ok but it happened a few more times on different games and seemed to become more frequent , that lead me to believe that there was some internal factor at work ,I also noticed that the spin up seemed to be louder, but what caused  the scratching remains a mystery to this day, mostly it would happen after a lengthy play  when the disc needed to be re-accessed ,  but it also happened early on , I replaced it and then got rrrod with the next twob  ,  but once I got the first redesign I had no problems.

My buddy had an OG 360 that scratched his discs. He thought it was his car's CD player, but then I told him about the 360 was known for it, even if you touched it a little while the disc was spinning. Looked at a few of his games and most had small circular scratches. This, along with one case of RROD and his disc drive that didn't want to read unless you inserted the disc about 8-10 times, are the reason he switched back to PS after switching to XB with the 1st Xbox.

The real problem is that MS likes to save a few cents/dollars on each system by skimping on the disk drive quality. That hasn't changed since the OG 360. The Slim isn't supposed to be touched/moved at all, either, or it will scratch disks. And the XBO can't be played vertically because of its cheaper disk drive, though I think they have lessened or fixed the scratching. I think, anyway.