Do optical drives (cdr / dvdr) fail after a few years?

[slackerinabox]

I've noticed that my pioneer a04 is making a lot of coasters lately.. I've been upgrading and downgrading firmwares for the past few months but I still have a 20% or so fail rate.. Do optical drives just die out over time? I've noticed the same thing happen to a cdrw drive as well.. Is this just the norm?

 

[radioouman]

Lite-on drives tend to fail in my experience. (I've sold plenty of these drives, and they seem to quit after 2 years.)

My Smart & Friendly 8X CD-R drive is still burning perfectly!

 

[Lonyo]

I've had 2 DVD drives fail (normal DVD drives) on 2 different machines, after about 2 years and 1 year. I don't think either were Lite-On. Never had a problem with 1 CD drive or 2 CD-RW's though.
One of the DVD drives was replaced and hasn't had any problems.

Everything fails in the end though, it's all mechanical and has lots of bits that can go wrong.

 

[Ronstang]

The only drives I have had fail over the last 3 years were 2 Ricoh burners and one Panasonic DVD. All of my Plextor, Lite-On, and cheepie drivers keep on going and going even after being shuffled between many machines doing the upgrade thing. Every component has a MTBF and some will die early and some will die later......but who cares, these days the average price of a CD-RW is about $30 with rebates.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Maybe if you didn't futz with the firmware so much ...

Hard to tell. I've had drives last anywhere from two months to ... well, my old 4X4 changer was made Feb '97 and still going.

- M4H

 

All depends on the manufacturer and just the random lemon factor.
I still have 1x, 2x 4x drives that still work as well as when I got them years ago.

 

[EyeMWing]

Firmware changes degrade the drive's reliability - A LOT.

Flash memory is an interesting storage system, and has an interesting ability to persist despite being overwritten. That's why you're always told never to change firmware or update BIOS unless you have a problem.

 

[bandana163]

I still have a 92' working ECS CD-drive.

 

[optoman]

I had a liteon 52/24/52 go bad on me a couple months ago. It lasted about a year. I can't complain because I paid less than $10 for it and when it went, Best Buy had the special for a new 52/32/52 liteon for $10.

The first one burned close to a 1,000 cdrs.

 

[gistech1978]

i had a refurb liteon dvd drive that crapped out...but i got some use out of it, and it was like 25 bucks. not too upset
my lite on 32x is still going strong (almost a couple years old)
i have an old 8x burner that i got in like 99 or 2000, it still works.
my year old dvd burner NEC-1000a works like a charm too.
*crosses fingers*