On 7/6/2015 6:11 PM, g wrote:

optical drives do not fair well burning a lot of dvd's.

thru the years of dealing with cd/dvd burners, i have found the above trouble shooting checks to prove out bad drives due to the increased voltage needed for dvd burning shortens laser's life.

good burners will burn many hundreds of DVD-R/+R before they conk, I know, I've done just that, and worn out a few drives :)

my experience is, find out what your drives maximum CLV speed is, and burn at that rather than let it spin up to the higher CAV speeds, and your burns will be more reliable and work in more readers. most later drives, thats 8X

now, its been a few years since I've done a lot of disk burning, and my current drives are all a couple years old. my newer main PC has a Lite-On iHBS112 in it, which is a blu-ray burner, although I've never used that functionality (I have read a few dozen BD video disks). specs on it say it burns DVD+/-R 16X CAV and 8X max by Zone CLV, so I'd use it at 8X. 16X CAV reading is just fine.

the other thing that kills optical disks is fine dust collecting on the lens assembly with age. This dust is nearly invisible unless you use a very high power magnifier and very bright oblique light, but very carefully cleaning said laser lens can resurrect a flakey drive (treat it like a fine camera lens, use a air puffer to blow off coarse dust, then a clean soft camel hair brush very gently to clean it). as the drives are so cheap, its hardly worth the effort of disassembly unless your time is worthless.