CD / DVD quality analyzing

[aposynthesi]

History: I'm experiencing massive buffer underrun, and other writing problems with my Samsung SH-S182D DVD+-RW. It's a fairly new drive, I bought it within the last year, to replace a faulty Plextor PX-716A DVD+-RW, which I had bought only a few months beforehand. The plextor drive broke itself, as did many others of the same model. I then replaced it with the Samsung, and had no problems writing CDs or DVDs until recently.

Question: Does anybody know how to resolve the buffer underrun problem, other than the obvious (restarting, shutting down apps, clearing memory, etc.)?
Does anybody know of, and had experience with any optical drive analyzation / diagnostics applications?

Thanks in advance!