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Short Lifetimes of Optical Drives?
lpq asks: "I have various optical disc readers from standard DVD players (apart from a computer), and both CD and DVD readers on one or more computers. My home stereo DVD's have been problematic for a while. One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them. Heaven forbid if it is an older or used DVD which have even more problems (some of my DVDs are approaching old age at an age of around 5 years). However, this is more about my computer's optical drives, including the CD readers. Both CD readers on two different computers have 'died' and are not able to read program disks. Am I specifically plagued by bad luck or do others go through CD/DVD drives so quickly?"
"My built-in DVD reader (Dell laptop) no longer reads DVD's, but can still read CD's. My external SCSI plextor has a hard time with music CD's, but can still read most program CD's. My iomega external won't recognize program CD's but can still seem to do DAE on audio CD's.
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
I took apart the IOMEGA, thinking it the easiest to get apart and took an air blower to the lens, but looking at it under a magnifying glass, I can't see a thing wrong with it. It still won't load any program disks, and kicks them back out as unreadable.
One computer is in my bedroom, the other in my living room with both commercial DVD players being in the living room (one used to be in bedroom, but with reliability issues of the older one in the living room, I moved the one in the bedroom out to living room. I still have to switch cables frequently depending on the DVD, as most play on the Digitron, the Sony seems to have poorer error recovery.
Is there anything I can do for maintenance. Air-canisters seem fairly limited in effectiveness and I've verified, at least in the IOMEGA external USB, it wasn't a scratched lens or at least nothing visible under magnification. This is really starting to drive me a bit crazy. It doesn't seem like I should have to replace these things so often.
My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable. They are in their 70s-80s, so they just didn't want to bother with such unreliable technology.
It concerns me to hear about higher capacity DVD's, since with greater density, errors will affect wider areas on the disk. I'm always careful not to touch surfaces of CD's/DVD's but I don't know if the higher density DVD's will be very stable for movie or data storage if they don't do something to improve error recovery.
What do other people do for optical disk drive maintenance? Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable?
As for video DVD's, should I just be resigned to play errors on almost 50% of DVD's -- usually they won't play on at least one of my players. What about bit-rot on the DVD's. Should I also be resigned to the fact that a DVD purchase is really only a temporary (5 +/-2 year rental) before it becomes unreadable?
The more egregious DVD problems have been with new, multi-CD series, where maybe one disk out of a 6-disk set (Buffy-season 2), Stargate Season 7, just won't play? It's a pain when they are gotten via mail-order even if they are a reputable dealer, since in both cases I've had 1 out of the set be bad, it was the last disc which I didn't get to for a few - several weeks.
What am I doing wrong?"
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
I took apart the IOMEGA, thinking it the easiest to get apart and took an air blower to the lens, but looking at it under a magnifying glass, I can't see a thing wrong with it. It still won't load any program disks, and kicks them back out as unreadable.
One computer is in my bedroom, the other in my living room with both commercial DVD players being in the living room (one used to be in bedroom, but with reliability issues of the older one in the living room, I moved the one in the bedroom out to living room. I still have to switch cables frequently depending on the DVD, as most play on the Digitron, the Sony seems to have poorer error recovery.
Is there anything I can do for maintenance. Air-canisters seem fairly limited in effectiveness and I've verified, at least in the IOMEGA external USB, it wasn't a scratched lens or at least nothing visible under magnification. This is really starting to drive me a bit crazy. It doesn't seem like I should have to replace these things so often.
My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable. They are in their 70s-80s, so they just didn't want to bother with such unreliable technology.
It concerns me to hear about higher capacity DVD's, since with greater density, errors will affect wider areas on the disk. I'm always careful not to touch surfaces of CD's/DVD's but I don't know if the higher density DVD's will be very stable for movie or data storage if they don't do something to improve error recovery.
What do other people do for optical disk drive maintenance? Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable?
As for video DVD's, should I just be resigned to play errors on almost 50% of DVD's -- usually they won't play on at least one of my players. What about bit-rot on the DVD's. Should I also be resigned to the fact that a DVD purchase is really only a temporary (5 +/-2 year rental) before it becomes unreadable?
The more egregious DVD problems have been with new, multi-CD series, where maybe one disk out of a 6-disk set (Buffy-season 2), Stargate Season 7, just won't play? It's a pain when they are gotten via mail-order even if they are a reputable dealer, since in both cases I've had 1 out of the set be bad, it was the last disc which I didn't get to for a few - several weeks.
What am I doing wrong?"
bad luck. sorry man. mine has been working since 1840.
Stop using a cleaner disc.
I think part of the original poster's problem is that the CD/DVD standards change subtley over the years without anyone really noticing. My toshiba laptop can't record on 700MB CDs for example. I don't think the problem will be solved until the industry is more forthright about versioning on media and drives.
I've had two CDR/CDRW drives so far which have decided that they won't let me burn above 8x and then died completely. The ones burned at 8x usually can't be read above 8x either. It's really annoying.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Well I guess this is from _the_ department :P
They're so cheap these days (and I do mean cheap...plastic gears suck), it's hardly worth the trouble to try and repair them. One exception might be high-end jukebox type players, but for single-disc players I'll typically just buy a new one.
I do agree though, that longevity seems to be a much bigger issue for DVD players than for CDs. I have one of the original Discmans with skip protection from circa 1993, and it still works just fine. I bought my first DVD player around 1997-8 IIRC, and am now on my third...
Pollen? Smokers? I've got an African Grey parrot, they shed a talc like substance that fairly covers everything in his room. You might consider setting up your computer with filtration and airflow so that it pushes filtered air out past the drive, rather than pulling unfiltered air past it towards the back of the machine.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I've been through 4 CD drives in the last 2 years and this is only counting my personal hardware. 3 of these drives were burners, one of them a Plextor SCSI drive. From what I hear this seems to be quite common and the burners are especially likely to go bad. At least prices have gone down so much now that they are pretty much disposable. Hell, it practically costs more to buy a spindle of blank DVDs than it does to buy the DVD burner itself. Reminds me of the situation with printers and ink.
The issues u have probably aren't dust, but the laser getting 'worn out' - this is especially bad for PS2's, where often the only thing u can do is manually adjust the potentiometer (voltage the laser gets) or take some clear film and creat a second lens to help the laser focus. And really, i think its just you. My xbox (a refurb) cant read DVD's, but thats the only dvd drive that i have tha has failed me in an unreasonable period of time. I have a Toshiba DVD player from like 1999 or something that is perfectly fine.
DVD is a mess. Between incompatible formats and cheap and nasty players, I've stopped trying to use DVD at all.
My home DVD player will play most movies but with jitters - skipping through parts of movies, freezing on the occasional disk.
I've switched to using disk & lan for everything except rented DVDs. No backups onto CD or DVD, but instead onto multiple redundant HD servers. Movies in digital form where possible. Music all digital since at least 5 years.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I've had two ultrabay optical drives fail on my ThinkPad. Both failed just after the year's warranty expired. One won't play anything at all, the other will play and burn CDs but refuses to read any DVDs (I get repeated DriveSeek errors for DVDs). Very annoying, considering the price.
Most of the CD-ROM's and DVD players on the computers I've bought have gone out on me, prompting me to replace them.
That is until I started building my own computers. Haven't had a problem...yet that is. I don't know if Gateway and Dell just cheap out when it comes to the CD-ROM drives they put into their machines, but I've had several go out on me over the years.
Put crap in, you're going to get a crap Drive. But honestly, I don't know why there were so many failed drives.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
You get what you pay for.
The only real problem I've ever had with optical drives has been with the tray. It seems that with some older, cheaper brands, the mechanism that opens the tray wears out and stops working. The drive works fine, but you just have to open it with a bent paper clip.
The real problem is that they are all made in China
I've had only one CD drive crap out on me and that I purchased in '95 (4X.. cost me like 200+). Generally, when I find things don't play, it's usually the media rather than the drive. My 8x burner is still running (got it around 00) as is my DVDROM (2001).
Uh... besides scratches, there's another pretty important thing called alignment. Does DVD cleaner disk refer to those stupid discs with a little brush on them? If so, what are you thinking? I've never understood how those things could remain on the market. Spinning a little brush at high speed and letting it hit the lens - that has to be incredibly great for its alignment... Sure it might clean it, but it's bound to have some effect.
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
All I can say is becaues of this, and many other issues, I'm NEVER buying Dell again and I hope you don't either.
About all your other problems and issues, sorry, but I don't know what to tell you.
Le français vous intéresse?
I dont know if this is the case, but sometimes spending the extra buck on a plextor is worth it. They aren't cheap but I have never had a problem with one. Some of the other value lines like I would find at a rock bottom price on pricewatch haven't been as good to me.
LASER disc player,
early CAV-CLV dual mode, still works just fine
Seriously, the condition of your air might be a huge problem. Do you happen to live in a dusty enviornment with lots of rough particles (i.e. sand). I have seen drives with tons of dirt from places like Egypt and other desert areas. QUite posslibly you just have a particulate problem.
Of course there are many other issues suck as moisture and other things, but I would think air quality is really important.
To address your question, I think you may be on to something. Perhaps, though, few people notice that optical devices are flaky in general because we upgrade so often and so many other things go wrong with computers. All I know is that my work computer's CD burner is dying now. It reads CDs and DVDs fine, but it is starting to fail when burning CD burns. It's getting worse and now fails about 50% of the time. Are we getting screwed by shoddy manufacturers, or is there a fundamental problem with optical drives?
Electric Monkey Pants
I'll tell you an amazing story. I have a DVD drive on this computer and an old external 4X CD burner. They play most discs, but sometimes one refues to play certain audio CD without skipping madly, and the other is fine. I think I eve had one of the CDs in the external burner REFUSE to play at all, and the computer would recognize it, while it played fine in the DVD drive, and my CD player downstairs. Amazingly enough, as I've been digitize my music, I've had almost no problems with discs digitizing correctly by using the DVD drive, even the ones I had problems with in the same drive when I just played them through the computer. I just stopped trying to figure it out, it was making my head hurt.
-EndBabble
...I've only ever had one computer optical drive fail on me, and that was an external CD-RW, that died after about two years. Even my 486 1x CD-ROM is still going pretty strong. That said, I do take great care of my discs, cleaning them, making sure they're not dusty when I put them in and so on.
However, when it comes to portable CD players, my experience is completely the opposite. Normally (I'm still using a portable CD player, even though I have digital copies of my music collection on my PC...more to do with bad experiences with MP3 players and battery life) - they tend to die ever year or so. I guess this is a combination of cost (I tend to buy pretty cheap players) and rough handling / ease of dust entering the lens casing.
I'd certainly expect a £20 DVD player to die earlier than a £200 one...but I'd say a combination of keeping discs free of dust and cleaning the lens every couple of weeks would go a long way to extending life - I've got a 15 year old CD player that handles everything I throw at it.
How hard do you PUSH those things? The old 2x SCSI CD Caddy drive in my computer from 1994 still works fine. All the media it comes with still works great too. All I can guess is maybe you live in a high humidty or extremely dusty/dirty house. My house is fairly clean, and I have never had optical drive problems. Don't just clean them out when they break, constantly clean them (if it is the dust/dirt problem) with air. Otherwise I can just suggest you be a little nicer to them and maybe they will be a little nicer to you.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
I used to have several 2x CD-Rom drives and they worked fine for years. But as soon as speed of CD-Rom drives went over 20x, they too often decided to break down in couple years. Trays broke down, disks began to jump, they refused to read some disks and so on.
So if you really want to have long working cd-rom drive, buy one which is as slow as possible. I'm trying to avoid 52x and 40x 's but it's difficult nowdays. Their realiability is below anything usable or cost efficient.
Maybe you should avoid buuying cheap PC components, or else expecting to replace it every two years as the cost of going cheap.
I also have a Sony jambox circa 1989 on which the CD player is slightly flakey but still functional. Ditto a 5 disc Teac CD player from around 1997. Maybe it's just you. ;-)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
i have had completly different luck. the DVD player i've had for 3 years is just now starting to show problems. it probably played at least 4 movies a day. I have cd/dvd drives in computers that are probably close to 10 years old now and still work fine. granted now that i said that they will probably all die.
I'm a cucumber
I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year, my wireless router lasted just past one year. My DVD player from 1998 or so is about to go in the trash because it does not recognize enough disks to be worthwhile.
The only upside is that everything keeps getting cheaper and more "featureful" so its not that bad to keep buying new stuff, but in general I find that consumer grade electronics are geared towards this quick obsolescence. If you want something to last, buy "professional" grade stuff. The low prices of regular junk is seductive, but don't count on any of it lasting.
Dump the IOMEGA and get some newer parents.
Along the same lines as this problem is the recent issues surrounding the new Sony PS2 slim design. It has had many reports of the laser death at very early ages. As I understand it, it was not the laser itself but the coils used to focus it that were the problem. Perhaps this is just more of the manufacturers using lower quality components to get us our $19.99 dvd player while still having everyone make a profit(?) getting it to you.
Don't use Drive cleaners or even compressed air, majority of the time it does more harm than good.
I don't know what you're doing, but I have several optical drives that have lasted well over 6 to 8 years. One being the 8x Compaq CDROM drive which came in my first computer which has a place of honor in an old server. Next being my TDK 24x CDRW drive that is actually a rebadged Plextor, I believe its about 4 years old. My DVD-ROM drive in this computer is a Pioneer that works perfectly, I've had it about 4 years as well. I sold a SCSI Yahama 6x CDRW drive to a friend and that's still kicking. Its about 6 years old.
What are you doing to your drives?! From what I can guess is you're buying piece of shit components and expecting them to last the long haul. If you notice, besides the Compaq drive, I buy somewhat quality components and they last and last and last. I don't expect a $20 bargain bin CDRW drive to last me more than maybe a month or 2 of heavy use, but all my plextor drives have lasted me.
One thing is for sure, however, you have a Sony. Every single SOny drive I've ever used, or every DVD player that they make has been crap. Sure it looks all pretty and may work with normal DVDs, but put a burned CD in there or maybe use your DVD player once a night and it will 'burn out' in less than a month or so. That's the case in my experience. With their DVD-ROM drives, they simply stop working well after a week. So my friends and I stopped buying them.
1. Don't buy any more Dells.
2. Don't use cleaner discs.
3. If your disks get scratched, clean them with toothpaste. (make sure to clean the toothpaste afterwards.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I just put a new DVD burner in my 1Ghz Powerbook (2.5yrs old) because the original DVD/CDRW crapped out (wouldn't read past about 500MB of a CD). My 7600's 8x CD drive died long ago (it's a Lite-On DVD now). Apple's stuff ain't perfect.
The guy has a serious problem but no one seems to be providing him a solution! Slashdotters...bet on the go, and provide real answers to what he might be doing wrong. As for me, I have no clue! All I know is that there is some kind of conspiracy with all electronic vendors. They all seem to agree on one thing -- Vendor Lock-in, for as long as it's possible.
I have had less problems with VCR tapes than DVD's. Tapes "degrade" better. And, they seem more child-proof. My kids ruin DVD's at a rate almost 3-to-1 over tapes. And, tapes are easier to fix: just transfer tape to a new case if the case is damaged, or use super-glue, and use transparent sticky tape to put snapped or tangle-fixed tape back together (one peice on each side). It will play a bit mumbly for the bad part, but that is far better than what bad sections of DVD's do. I will agree that it can be a lot of work to fix the worse-case tapes, but at least they are usually fixable if you decide to spend the effort.
Table-ized A.I.
It seems to me like many xboxes, especially those that play cdrom-intensive games like Halo, cause the DVD drive on them to break.
In my experience short lifespans are typical for optical drives, although if you spend a lot of money and get high-end Pioneer or Plextor drives they last a long time, and the Pioneer drives are good at reading the most scratched discs that other players will just spit out.
On a related note, stop using DVD cleaner discs - all they do is scratch the lens unless your DVD drive is located somewhere that it collects massive amounts of dust. Electronics stores have been pushing those stupid things on consumers for years because the markup runs anywhere from nine-hundred to several-thousand percent depending on whether you just buy the disc or buy it as part of some silly cleaning kit comeplete with a soap and isopropyl alcohol solution.
Have you made sure the disks itself are clean? not scartches etc, but typically finger prints.
Fingerprints (everyone leaves them, hands washes or not) are likely to generate errors. always hold optical discs by it's side and optionally center hole.
In my experience, 99% of read errors are from fat fingers. you can easily detect them by 'breathing' on the cd, the moisture will clearly show fingerprints. Wipe with something soft, like a t-shirt.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
I am, and my drives display the same short-life behaviours as yours. I suspect tar glues to the optic and is not removable without a major cleanup (mechnical action like air blow or cleaner discs is inefficient).
when i had a creative 24x cdrom, i occasionally took it out of the case, screwed it open and cleaned the lens with some random piece of cloth. worked like magic.
Don't know about pure "reader" drives (except in standalone players, anybody uses them yet?) but modern burners in my experience tend to gradually go down after ~500 disks (you may not even notice that if not using some testing tools). And that's nothing to be surprised about - you get what you buy - these things work on the edge (why do you think after you burned 10 disks in a row the last ones are so hot?), they are made of cheapest components possible, and they cost $60 for a high-speed DVD burner. OTOH - earlier TEAC drives, like W58E are still going OK around me (maybe done several thousands burns and used as reader all the time). But they costed $150+ (multiply by 2 to account for inflation) and they weigh around a kilo (~2pounds).
BTW, nowadays, I tend to buy Sony/LiteOn.
Your computer hates you.
(That's seems like a logical explanation for most of my problems)
Ive noticed that newer drives tend to have a shorter life span then older ones.
Harddisks, the same, tape drives, monitors.. Pretty much any conusumer product really... They may *look* cooler, have more features, but they just are not made to last.
If they sell you something that lasts, where will their sales for next season come from?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While I haven't had so many problems with the drive mechanisms -- other than CDs recorded above 8x not reading back on a different drive (I only record at 4x now if I can help it).
My problem is that I have an older DVD player (3 years old) and on many disks the picture changes brightness up and down at random, and occasionally I get the picture dropping down on the screen and the sprocket holes on the edge of the film showing for several seconds at the top of the screen. This does not happen on my computer DVD player.
This seems to be related to Macrovision or some other copy protection on the disks. It almost always happens with Criterion and disks from within the last 2 years, but not at all for disks pressed before then.
So, it appears that indeed creeping changes in the formats are wrecking compatibility -- and you have no real alternatives except to get new gear.
i saved my 3 year old keyboard recently from being garbage after being "diagnosed" by my vendor as dead - the fix, open the board, get some moisture out from near the power button where the wire exits. i also saved my logitech mouse - the left clikc button was worn out after overusage and again "diagnosed" by the vendor as dead and replaceable - the fix? a fraction of a millimeter in height of glue placed on contacts of the left click button and the sensor inside. both work like a treat. however - i couldnt get my lousy samsung cdrom drive tray from getting stuck, nor could i stp my old hp drive fromg going phut after years of using it, while samsung was a clear case of cheap plastic works, Hp drive wasnt. after all samsung pioneered the art of making products with a timer - that timesout just after the warranty period. well, almost! my hp drive had fits of getting misaligned. probably its a case of vendors thes days wanting to make products that last a few years say - 3-5 years everything depending on price. either ways - the product would get outdated, along with the particular standard! (vcd, supervcd, ld, dvd, minidisc, flash storage, digital tapes, the list goes on ...whew!)
Cheap optical drives will stop working after a while. I've gone through three drives on my PC, all of which have stopped working in the past 5 years. As much as I hate Sony, they seem to make pretty good portable products. My Discman still works perfectly, and my Walkman stayed alive for over ten years. The separate DVD player is a Panasonic, and is holding up OK except for one error it had when it just died in the middle of Fight Club.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
stop buying chinese dvd players.
After 2-3 years, most of mine have stopped reading R/RW disks, then it's all downhill from there. Only one drive I had lasted more than 6 years, a Mitsumi 4x CDR. My kids used to go through drives every 6 months! All the DVD players I bought for the TV, a whopping 2 of them, still work fine. One is a Sony that is coming up on 8 years now and we still use it.
I own a small PC repair business and have replaced more CD disk drives than I would care to admit. I feel and usually tell my customers that heat build up inside the case shortens the life of the CD drive. Most people cram as much as they can inside the case usually without any thought of power supply requirements or cooling. Most agree to an additional case fan after I replace the CD Drive.
if your readers can't get to the point without hitting the scrollbar, they'll just stop reading.
:-)
Maybe you need a higher resolution screen.
I work in tech support, and fairly often people call in because their CD or DVD rom drive isn't working anymore. Roughly 60% of the time or more, it's actually a software problem and their drive is just fine. This usually happens when burning software has been removed, or replaced by another program, windows can't load the driver anymore and there's some stuff you have to clear out of the registry before it will work again. Or sometimes you just have to remove the IDE controller, reboot and let windows reinstall it and find the optical drives again.
In 1990 I bought myself a brand new CD ROM! Wow! In those days they didn't even have 1x or 2x speed, it was just a CD ROM. It was made by Philips I think. It lasted me a full 6 years until 1996 when it broke because I snapped the tray during a party. No doubt it would have continued for many more years faithfully rotating out data at a laughable >1x speed. So I bought a new one, an amazing 4x Hitachi CD R/W. It came with a 12 month warranty. It lasted exactly 11 months and died without warning. I was very happy that the store honoured the warranty and replaced it with a brand new one. However, since they didn't make 4x devices any longer I begrudgingly had to take a 6x one. Well guess what? 11 month later to the day nearly, I boot up and the 6x CD is making a ghastly clicking sound and looks like its bought the farm again. So I check the warranty, and Im covered. So back to the store and this time they are all out of 6x devices, so after much arm twisting and threats I reluctantly go home with an 8x CD ROM unit. At this point let me factor out the obvious iteration and say that this cycle lasted 5 times through, taking me to 2001 whereupon I accidently became the unfortunate owner of a device capable of outliving its warranty (by 3 or 4 months). Damn! I've done very well out of the 'disposable age' thanks very much.
Then again thinking of those landfill sites overflowing with mountains of dead and dying CD ROMs makes me sad for the environment, and the CD ROMs.
I have yet to see any computer optical drive last more than four years. Most of them barely work when they're new. I guess they're telling us not not expect much for 60 bucks. We shouldn't let then get away with it. We all really fell for that hype about the durability of CDs and DVDs. And now we will have to buy new players and media every few years. I know I won't have the ability to build a long term solution until I can hack my turntable to back up my data to vinyl.
What?
So how else do manufacturers cut corners? By skimping on quality control, obviously. If 20% of your production run dies within months of coming off the line, it costs you -- but apparently not as much as making your production methods bulletproof.
When my mother asked me to help her buy a DVD player, I knew she'd freak if she bought one that died quickly. So I looked hard for a model that has a solid reputation for never breaking down. Couldn't find a one. Even the expensive models from Big Name brands seem to get a lot of complaints that say, "Had it for a year, then it died." Thought of recommending a service contract, but that's almost as expensive as replacing the thing every other year. So I had her buy the cheapest one in sight, and crossed my fingers. So far so good.
Perhaps you're doing something wrong, but I think you've probably just had a run of bad luck. The only thing you can do is just replace the drives as they die. There ought to be a better answer to your problem than that -- but I really don't think there is.
Of 5 CD & DVD drives I've bought in the last few years, 2 failed just after the 1-year warranty period. These are drives that saw moderate use in a home environment.
Two short stories:
A friend of mine had a portable CD player that he hooked through his home stereo with a Y-cable. He put the CD player on top of the amplifier when in use. Guess what happened? The heat from the ventilation slots on the amplifier ultimately killed the accuracy of the CD player such that it wouldn't track anymore.
My parents bought a cheap DVD player and set it on top of their TV. They don't have a home theater or stereo system, so they just use the speakers built into the TV. Plus, my dad is losing his hearing so he always has to jack the sound way up on movie to hear the dialog. Guess what? The DVD player now doesn't track right, probably due to all the vibrations being constantly sent through it by the speakers inside the TV set.
Laptop optical drives (and hard drives and screens and everything else) die frequently because people jostle their laptops around and mistreat them, so no surprise there. But if you're having as many optical drive tracking-related failures as you claim to be having, then your drives are probably getting damaged through thematic mistreatment. Make sure your drives aren't sitting on any surface that eminates heat or is carrying vibrations.
BTW, the reason heat kills tracking of optical drives is that 99% of optical drives are built with a standard type of laser-tracking mechanism. The laser head rides along a metal rod/rail on one side, and then a parallel worm gear drives the head movement on the other side. With this approach, it's crucial that the metal rod/rail and the sleeve that rides on it have a low-friction relationship so they don't catch when the worm gear on the other side is trying to slide the head around. It's also crucial that the worm gear itself have a low-friction relationship with the threaded sleeve that rides along it so that it won't catch or bump as it does its work. It's typical for manufacturers to put some special lubricant on both the worm gear and the slider rod to reduce friction -- and it turns out to be essential for the whole thing to work. If you continually expose the device to heat, or to extremely dry conditions, the lubricant dries up and then the device won't track properly anymore. I've fixed several CD/CD-ROM drives that weren't tracking right by simply opening them up and applying a safe-for-plastics (silicone-based) lubricant to the worm gear and rail/rod with a Q-tip, and then working it in evenly by putting in a full audio CD and skipping from track to track to cause the head to move along the full range back and forth a few times.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I have a stack of five optical drives under my desk. Four of them are dead, but only one of those is a DVD drive; the rest are old CD-ROM drives. The working drive is a K Hypermedia 48x CD-RW, which a friend gave to me after replacing it with a DVD burner.
What's not in that stack is another drive of mine which failed in a very peculiar way: it reads silver-colored pressed discs and CD-Rs just fine, but it rejects gold-colored discs, which happen to be about half the DVDs I own. I'm not sure about CD-RWs.
Currently in my computer I have a Plextor 16/10/40A and a generic DVD writer. The Plextor died a few years ago, but was replaced under warranty. These days, I have no problems with either drive.
DJ's usually get their CD players realigned. DVD players are no different. Just because a DVD player thinks it is in position X doesn't mean it actually is.
Capitalism requires continually increased consumption, so commodities must necessarily have shorter and shorter lifespans. Soon you'll be buying a dvd player every month, wondering what happened to the "good ole days" when it was every couple years. The upshot is: commoditizing resources faster than they can be replenished is impossible to sustain.
I've been noticing this a lot over the past couple years with friends bringing their computers for me to fix. I can't correlate to any particular brand of computer or drive. Just seems like a high failure rate in general. I've not been using DVD drives long enough to evaluate reliability, but will probably be on the lookout for good sales to keep one or two in the storage room cause I figure I'm going to be needing them.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Invest in some air filters for your house.
i have a regular dvd player that i have had for 5 or six years and works all of the time but i only use it for watching movies and nothing else. I have had on cd burner start to stop burning but it still read cds most of the time. but it didnt star messing up until i had burned several hundered cds. The best avice i can give you it to make sure that the dvd or cd that you ar putting in your player is clean when you put it in. this is the most important thing you can do because it can cause dirt to build up fast and ruin a good dvd or cd player.
"Drive Fast Kill Slow"
1) Don't use cleaner disks that have the little brushes; they can knock the head out of alignment. As a last-ditch for a dead drive, you might try one of the cleaner PADS, but even so that is not something to do with a working drive.
2) Make sure the case has positive air pressure inside (simplest way is to have one more intake fan, placed at least halfway up the case, than it does outflow fans), to keep air flowing OUT through the various drive orifices. I live in the dusty desert with house cats, and even so, thanks to their intake fans, my systems stay nearly white-glove clean inside.
3) Make sure the case has good cooling; some CDRWs are extremely heat-sensitive.
4) If you smoke, quit. Cig smoke residue is very hard on computer components. (Damp ocean air isn't much better.)
5) DON'T put labels on burned disks; there is no way you can align them exactly enough to avoid throwing the disk out of balance, and that can eventually damage the drive's alignment.
As to personal experiences:
ALL Yamaha CDRWs I've seen to date (20 so far, both SCSI and IDE) have died prematurely, due to overheating that eventually warps the laser out of alignment.
But otherwise, they're pretty damned durable. Right now in everyday use I have:
-- Plextor 24x CDRW (2001)
-- LiteOn 52x CDRW (2002)
-- LiteOn 48x CDRW (2002) -- has burned over 1000 disks (with occasional all-day marathons).
-- Acer 50x CDROM (2000)
-- Mitsumi 4x CDROM (1995)
-- LiteOn 16x DVD (2002)
Plus a whole bunch of CDROMs (Panasonic, Sony, various generics) in other boxes, that date back as far as 1994, and still work. Also, I've *never* seen ANY LiteOn unit go bad, and most clone dealers will say the same.
The only optical drives I've had die were three Yamaha CDRWs (see above), and one ancient Panasonic 2x (1994) that lost its drive belt at age 6, tho it still worked otherwise.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have also had bad luck with optical drives. They seem to last 6-8 years before dying and I wouldn't be surprised if this was due to my buying the cheapest hardware possible.
And this makes me wonder... is there a site out there anywhere that tracks component lifetimes and RMA rates? Anyone know of a consumer reporting agency that deals with lifetimes and durability (instead of the typical advocacy based on features/power)?
I've found subjective claims on hardware, for instance, but it would be nice to see hard data.
They seem to act up after about a year of use, probably dust and part wear. Typically 1 in 10 of movie DVD's will just flat out not work reguardless of what player is being used. Though in those cases I've always been able to rip the DVD to my computer to watch it from the harddrive even though I couldn't play it straight from the DVD in the same drive.
There has also been the joy of burning a DVD only to find out that the format is not readable by their drive or DVD player. Not usually a problem with my fellow computer nuts, but frustrating when you want to send video to family and friends. I've come to absolutely loath any form of optical media and treat it as an unreliable form of storage. I've never had a disc go bad on me yet, but I've had to play the game of musical drives many times to find one that would read it.
I say "Nuts" (just got done watching Band of Brothers) to optical media. Let them drown in the sess pool of formats and incompatible hardware.
My solution has been CF chips and a portable harddrive for file transfers and file backup. Less headaches all the way around.
I live at high altitude (7200 feet) and cd and floppy players last about 5 years here if they are not in regular use. The main failure is the rubber drive belt decays and breaks presumably due to higher ozone.
Look at the MTBF of a drive or player before you buy it. You'll notice that the more expensive one probably has a higher MTBF. Sadly, that spec is becoming harder and harder to find pre-purchase. If you need, you could probably download the product manual and it should be listed in there.
As a side note, anyone notice the HUGE difference between a caddy drive and tray drive? I hung on to caddies as long as I could just because the drives were bullet-proof.
On PC equipment, my very first CD drive (1x) started randomly not seeing CDs after a couple of years. The replacement (a 2x writer, Hi-Val, a rebagged OEN version of a Philips) also squickly started having read and write problems. Eventually it would not write and CDRs, although it would still write CDRWs. Several other readers in this time period gave me frequent random reading problems. The next writer I git was an Iomega brand (also an OEM rebranded unit). That drive never worked right from the start, there were firmware issues dealing with 700 meg CDRW media. Iomega played stupid but I found out later the problems were well known to the original maker, Iomega just couldn't be bothered with firmware upgrades. They will never sell me another product. I also have a DVD reader that is flaking out in several ways, some read problems but mostly just getting it to open it's door is a problem. The replacement for the CDRW drive was a Lite-On drive. It worked well for about a year, but recently has been producing so many bad writes that I had to stop burning with it. Still reads OK. Even had one drive that was D.O.A., but sat on the shelf too long before being installed for it to be returned.
Have tried all of the obvious repairs to all of the above, including opening them and cleaning/inspecting the lense assembly, but no luck with any.
So overall I would have to say that if any other industry produced equipment the quality of optical drives, they would go out of business quickly and there would be massive consumer lawsuits. Why this isn't the case with this calss of product I'm not sure.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My dishwasher just broke down half an hour ago. Took the mechanism apart, and guess what, the part that gets abused the most (besides the motor), a plastic gear, is not only made out of plastic, but it is made out of two pieces of plastic glued together.
On the other hand if everything worked "forever" how would the salepeople at Sears survive.
On the other leg, washing by hand is good therapy, and I can turn the old dishwasher into storage space.
I only recently purchased a DVD player. Like, in the last month.
I still have misc. 4x and 8x CDROM drive which work reliably and consistently.
I've had two CD burners die: a 24x/4x/2x and a 32x/8x/2x (I think).
In general, I don't use either for much. That's why we've got networks. I really don't want a non-electronic data transfer method which gets openly exposed to the outside world on a regular basis.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've managed to repair two drives that wouldn't read disks by opening them up and locating two variable resistors, adjustable by means of a cross-hair screw driver. These were box like, and seemed to control the speed of the tracking motor and the spindle respectively (i could make them go stupidly fast or slow). By experimenting with these, i managed to get the right speed for both, and all has been fine since! I don't know if many drives still have these things though, this was five or six years ago...
...on your usage pattern. I work in the operations department of a television station, and we regularly (once a month) use a cleaner disk on our DVD burners. But then again, we have dirty dvds going in non stop every day.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
I bought a lite-on cd-rw drive a couple of years ago because everyone was going on about how they were great burners for the money. It burned fine for the first few months, then started having problems writing. This was fixed a few times by reflashing the firmware. Now, however, the thing doesn't even read/recognize discs at all...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
...don't buy off-brands. I've only had bad luck with any no name CD/DVD drive that I've ever had.
Right now I have a creative 6x DVD drive in my computer that's about 5 or more years old, and my normal DVD player for my TV is 4-5 (can't really remember, but more than 4 years for sure).
The ones that have died? One was by "JustLink", and the other one didn't have any markings at all as to the brand. Right now I have another burner made by Sony and it's going strong.
Buy cheap brands, get cheap products.
Is to pay a lot of money for it.
/. article from today) laser diodes dim over time, cheap diodes dim faster, and often have a lower voltage bias set because they can't handle as much power. The lower initial voltage makes them go out that much faster.
Dust and pollen, smoke (a really bad one!) do all shorten the life of a drive, but the REAL kicker is cheap-ass mechanisms. Anyone can buy a $1 laser diode and build an optical pickup, but these cheapo diodes are, well cheap crap. Just like LEDs (see earlier
Beyond the cheap diodes used in so many cheap electronics, the mechanism design itself is important. a good laser pickup will be SEALED. Many cheapo pickups have the internal guts of the pickup exposed to air, that means not only is the objective lens going to collect dust, but so is the prism, colimating lens, mirror and photo-diode face. Thats no fewer than 5 extra surfaces to collect dust, pollen and smoke (Did I mention that smoke is REALLY bad?) Spend about twice what the cheap ones cost and you'll get a unit that lasts twice as long.
I have a Mitsubishi CD player that cost over $2500 in 1988, it STILL WORKS PERFECTLY! Not only that, but it reads CD-Rs just fine too! It sounds like crap 'cuz it's got first generation DACs, but the high quality laser diode and sealed mechanism have shown thier supperior resistence to the vageries of time. The 1x(!) CD drive for my SUN 3/110 (manf. date 1989!!!) also works perfectly, and that sucker probably went for almost $4000 new.
Cleaning and re-alignment are both do-able and can correct the sorts of problems outlined here, but unless there's solid engineering and quality parts behind the lens it's not worth bothering.
Another thing you get with a more expensive drive is better error correction, both HARDWARE and SOFTWARE. Many cheap drives have a set-screw for sled angle and tracking linearity, the best drives have self-adjusting mechanisms. Also, better drives will have wide-range variable power controllers for the laser instead of just a couple switched resistor pre-sets, this allows the drive to more accurately correct of the tranmissive and reflective changes in the surface of the disc. Even basic drives have pretty good "groove tracking" but being able to correct for optical variations is important too. Good error correction software is also important. A nice buffered oversampling drive should be ABLE to read through a pretty decent size scratch wihout issue. But drives with tinny buffers and poor re-read capability will choke on the smallest scuff.
P.S. RE: celaning discs... Those little brushes don't pack enough force to alter alignment on most drives, unless they are cheap-crap or spin up to 52x. The lens itself is on a floating electromangenticaly aligned sub-frame, so it can get bashed arround by those brushes quite a lot without problems. The real issue with cleaning discs is that they just don't do a very good job. They are OK preventative maintenance, but once the lens gets dirty enough to start effecting the drive's ability to read discs, you'll probably need to go in there with an Alcohol dampened q-tip. Also, smoke residue (Did I mention this one is the worst?) is quite sticky and will not redily come off without a little alcohol.
My 2-cents.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
It looked so simple, with no disassembly required.
Somethign else to consider with the stand alone dvd players is that in the last year or two the pre-recorded media has changed sufficiently that some first generation DVD players have difficulties recognizing the newer dvds. My friend has an older sony dvd player - it still plays his old discs fine but plays less than 1 in 3 new discs.
I had similar problems with early cd burners from a couple different manufaturers. They wouldn't play certain kinds of disks like the ones that come on gaming magazines or wouldn't recognize data on a cd-r that they just burned.
I've had a bit of trouble with my set-top dvd players, but not much. Of course they are so cheap now I've managed to get 3 of them (not counting the ones in computers) so I can usually manage to get a disk to play.
I agree with others that the lens alighment seems to be the likely problem. Years ago I had a portable cd player that would skip all the time so i took it apart and there was a thing in there that looked like it had a screwdriver slot, so i put one in and twisted it. Put it back together and it worked a lot better from then on. I'm not sure I would reccomend taking it apart unless you didn't mind breaking it completely.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If anyone is curious or didn't know, the reason that one media type (CD or DVD) can fail to read, but the other will work fine is due to how the combo drives operate. They utilize two different laser setups for reading the two kinds of discs, so one can fail while the other still functions. Hope that's informative to someone.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3APlanned+Ob solescence
I worked for many years (over 30 years..saw the change to solid-state from vacuum-tubes) as an electronics repair tech on everything from consumer electronics to industrial automation to aircraft avionics.
That said, the number one and two killers of CD/DVD drives in my bench experience are physical shock that knocks the optics out of alignment, and using 'cleaning discs' that also fsck the optics alignment, with dust/smoke residue coming in a distant third.
On some of the older drives, there were also trimmer-adjustments for various parameters in the support cicuitry that could become out of spec due to age and other factors, as well as being barely in-spec from the factory to start with. These trimmers (if they exist) should only be tweaked if you have the proper test equipment (*good* oscilloscope, DMM, frequency counter, signal generator at a minimum) and tech manuals with values and procedures specified, otherwise you'll have junk quickly.
The bargain drives aren't really such a bargain, as the quality of components and initial alignment/adjustment and quality assurance are marginal at best. As has been the trend for some time now with most consumer electronics, it's easier and cheaper to just replace it rather than repair it.
I noticed a few posts mentioning using compressed/canned air cleaning. This is about the best method, but use caution. The pressure of a compressed-air blast at close range to the optic head can damage it also. The actual optic lens assembly floats on extremely fragile, tiny springs, and is very easy to damage with a strong blast of air.
Overall, the best ways to get maximum life out of your CD/DVD drives are to handle them like the fragile devices they are, don't use "cleaning discs", and by whatever method, try to keep dust/smoke/etc. away from the drives.
Hope that helps.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I think it's more of the poster's bad luck (or buying of shitty drives, perhaps). I still have a 2x CDROM drive and a 2x ACER CDburner in one of my computers and they both still work very well. New drives that I have on the other hand, have died more quickly as they get more fast.
Dear god, i remember the old CD-ROM in my dad's old computer.... POS..... Hardly ever worked right. I remember once, I felt so violent towards it. I got a new game, that I of course wanted to play. The POS didn't want to read it!! I sat there for 20 minutes (sadly) putting the tray in and out, in and out, until it eventually read it........ So to put it shortly, no, you are not....... I've also had other drives show signs of trouble.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I purchased a new DVD player recently because of these issues. In the first week, I found 2 brand new DVDs that would not play. Over a period of time, what I have noticed is that the discs that have the highest failure rate are the ones with the plastic coating on one side of the DVD. My Blade Runner DVD is beat to Hell, as I have watched it many times and, even though I am careful with it, setting it down on a table carefully and picking it up later accumulates wear over time. Well. It plays flawlessly and has played that way for several years.
:-). Damn kids! Now if I could just stuff all my DVDs into an iPod. Oh right, that's coming in 3 to 5 years. WOO!
The Blade Runner DVD has none of that plastic coating crap on either side, and I think it makes a huge difference. In fact, the first disk that I tried in the new player was The Legionnaire (Van Dammage silliness). I tried that one because I recall 3 relatively new DVD players in a row failing to play that one. It was the first disk that I put in the brand new DVD player, and it still did not work. A similar pattern followed for a large number of "covered" DVDs that I tested during the first few weeks. At any rate, I am not sure why, but I think that plastic coating on one side of a DVD causes serious alignment issues when the DVD is rotating at play speed in the drive. Maybe the DVD floats lower than normal and the laser focuses at a point above the surface. Or perhaps the coating is not sprayed on uniformly in some cases and it causes a wobble at high rotation speeds.
I think a normal environment alignment issues will get you far faster than lense clarity issues. If you have some animal that spews talc directly from its feathers and into the DVD player, OK, exception to that rule. Some day our kids will look back at DVDs with an expression of horror and be very thankful for solid state storage technology. I guess with the iPod they already are,
Okay, I should note that I'm a smoker, but this trick works surprisingly often on others' hardware, too.
Use either a cleaning disk or a Q-Tip (again, not necessarily good for alignment) or a proper microfiber cloth, and use anti-reflective eyeglass cleaner to clean the lens. Not plain rubbing alcohol, not the mystery cheap spray that comes with the kits.
In general, pick a cleaner that (duh) dries clean and clear and your eyeglasses, without spots.
I can often restore a somewhat-flaky drive by using one of those silly cleaning discs nicely saturated (read, practically dripping) with the stuff, without ripping it open. Obviously wipe the tray free of grit beforehand, and again afterwards.
Cleaning discs usually don't help, but remember, the optical assembly is finely calibrated but balanced on an electromagnetic positioning mechanism, so it's supposed to be able to compensate for the occasional nudge or jolt. Far more often, getting enough signal through the lens proves to have been the problem. (I've never understood why the lens faces *upwards,* and it amazes me that tray drives force the data side to scrape the tray... but then, as we all know, cheap CDs don't have much in the way of protection on the 'back.')
Some drives use plastic guides for the optical pickup. Over time this wears and the drives go out of alignment. This plagued some Sony Playstations, wouldn't be suprised if some PC drives are like that.
With technology changing so fast and prices for some units so low it's no wonder they're not built to last.
I would imagine the best CD/DVD drives are laptop units, since you can see the internals.
"DVD's" and "CD's" are not plural. They're possessive ("my DVD's surface is all scratched up because I'm an idiot") or contractions ("That DVD's about a guy who can't pluralize"), but not plural. If you want the plural form of "DVD", it's pretty simple -- add an 's' without the apostrophe, as in "DVDs". Is that so hard?
I have 3 Plextors.
- A PX-708A that is about 18 months old
- A PX-716UF about 4 months
- A PX-716A about 3 weeks.
Very recently my batting average has been dropping. I use them all on dual-boot XP and Linux systems.
The PX-708A stopped reading and writing all CD media about a month ago. Unfortunately, it's out of warranty so I can't RMA. It still reads and writes DVDs, so it's still usable.
The PX-716A just stopped reading all media period, 2 days ago. I wasn't even 3 weeks old. I just shipped it back as an RMA this morning.
Knock on wood, the UF is still fine. Hopefully, the 716A was an "infant mortality" failure, and not Plextor's quality going down hill. (I bought Plextors because of past experience with their CD drives!)
Back in 1999 I started collecting very large amounts of fan subbed anime in various file formates. Over a 3 year period I burnt near 300 anime CD's. I have gone through 3 CD-ROM drives in this period as well.
The first CD-ROM drive died possibly due to over burning disks.
The second drive died due to being used too often to read disks. And the third one died for the same reason as well due to my hosting of an anime server on hotline. (Ah the good old days).
As of recently I have been looking into moving my collection onto DVD storage. I have found some interesting statistics.
Of brand name disks, I have seen so far 100% data integerity, even at 3 - 5 years old.
As for those no-name cheap brands, they seem to be averaging 75% data integerity. As for memoryx, it has a solid 0% data integerity.
All in all, depending on use you will need to continue replacing your optical drives. As for optical storage, make back ups of your backs at least once a year. Or else feel free to pay the money for those brand name CD/DVD's because they do a much better job living up to their life time warrenty.
I hope you all found this Informative!
Dollar Highway Financial News
In my experience, CD-RW/DVD-RW drives are much better at reading disks than non-recorder type drives. They are usually much more reliable at reading all disk types.
The worst makes for failure that I have encountered are:
- Raite Optronic - truly dismal quality
- Samsung - just poor quality
- NEC (the one poor quality component in the Dell machines I used to support - with a near 100% failure rate [failure being considered the inability to read a selection of different types of disk])
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/24/45212/6874
cause I think you just hit the nail on the head. Even if there is a revolution brewing, it's not the Holy Grail or anything, because LED'S DO NOT LAST FOREVER.
MOD PARENT UP!
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I have to clean my xbox DVD lens and mirror every 3 months to keep it working. This page http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Repairs/cleaning_your_d vd_drive.htm has good tutorial on how to do it.
Also if your PC or XBOX or whatever with a DVD drive in it is sitting on the floor you can help prevent lint and dust from collecting in it so fast by putting it on a table
This is off topic but they won't as far as I'm conserned. They ripped me off with a piece of junk fridge so I will never deal with the company again.
I had a set with a bad disk. Disk 1 worked fine, Disks 3-5 worked fine, but Disk 2 wouldn't work in any player in my house.
I took it back to Best Buy (yeah, yeah, evil blah blah blah...) and the girl at the customer service counter said, "Go get another one off the shelf." I was out of there with a working set of disks in 5 minutes.
I've heard several stories about bad disks in the SG-1 Season 7 set. There must've been a problem with the first runs at the disk presser.
Here is what I do whenever my CD or DVD is not read by a player. Take an alcohol, cotton swab, open your player and clear the lens. That's it, it works everytime, at least for me. Try it!
Regards
I've had several optical drives go out in the last year. And I have experimented with what to do. I actually got one to burn CDs after cleaning.
I used a "cleaner disk" on one. Later I opened that drive and found that the lens was opaque. The "cleaner disk" had scratched the lens. I think it's because the "cleaner disk" was designed for glass lenses and this cheep (US$70) DVD writer has a plastic lens.
The method that fixed two drives was to use caned air to clean the prism. The prism is a little "glass" cube under the lens. The sleds contain at least 4 optical parts laser, prism, lens and detector. On the cheep drives it is very hard to get at the prism because the parts seem to be "snap together" and don't come apart easily.
Any way, I figured out what seems cause my drives to go bad. I was leaving the drive open overnight and just enough dust got in to mess up the optics.
I've managed hundreds of systems over the years and never once had an optical drive failure. In everything from 5+ year-old x86 boxes to caddy-loaded early PowerMacs to the new G5's. My current office has many optical drives 5+ years old and have never had any difficulties. Maybe this is because most systems are macs and Apple tends to use good components? However, the quality of modern Mac systems (post-Jobs return) is not like it used to be. I still have a PowerMac 6100 with original CD drive working perfectly! I have also never used a cleaning disc on anything.
2 drives stop working and you think thats bad luck?
:P
In the past few years alone i've had atleast 8 drives stop working, including one exploding (while playing a game) the faceplate shooting off one, the cd inside SHATTERING into about 80 some odd VERY sharp jagged peices, which Jetknifed out of the drive and some even hit me)
It took me a year to figure out that touching a mouse or keybaord cord with a vacuum can fry the device, so I've also lost about 10 mice/Kb's that just suddenly stoped working and i couldnt figure out why (on multiple hardware setups)...
I realize the vacuum'd hardware is my own ignorance to common sense of the static generated by a vacuum, but the cd drives on differnt pcs is just pure bad luck
I've had a few small problems for my desktop's CD-ROM drives... at times, they just seem to not want to read any CDs at all. I'll pop a disk in, wait a bit, and go to My Computer, where it says there is no disk in the tray. I've tried several cleaning methods and nothing worked. I even popped in a Linux Live CD to see if it would load it when I restarted (in the event of a bad driver error) and it did not. But luckily standard drives are no where near as expensive as they used to be (I wonder why) so it's not that difficult and priceful to purchase and install a new one.
I have had some pretty bad luck with Apex DVD players though. The one in my room right now, which is less than a year old, tends to make almost any DVD I play in it go from normal (kinda bright) to really dark constantly during play. I don't really understand it, but it's very annoying. And the Apex DVD player in our living room tends to play half the movie in color and then automatically switch to black and white out of nowhere. It also has some problems playing certain DVDs.
We need new disk reading standards! Hah.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I would have to agree with one of the posters above, that if you buy a cheap drive, you will get lower quality. I have used only Pioneer and Plextor drives in all my systems (that I only build myself), and I have never encountered a problem in more than 8 years. The only time I have to replace a drive is when the technology is outdated.
How do you expect mechanics to last if they have to be priced so low ? Lets take an example of the $99 DVD-Recorder.
With electronics, there is a continuous costdown cycle by integrating more on a chip and making them in a smaller process. But this still leaves the mechanical parts at the same cost. So the plastics get more and more fragile, and the dvd loader software is supposed to handle the error correction to cover up for the garbage quality manufacturing and zero quality components. Walmart is still making profit on this $99 dollar machine, the shipping company is making some money, and the DVD forum has its $12 royalties as well, then there is DTS, DivX royalties (if it has the logo) and that leaves about $1 for the Chinese factory.
Great recipe for disposable electronics.
It is true that the goal of the manufacturer is to sell their product, if 2% of price is more important to the buyer than long term reliability then that would explain the issues.
I haven't had as bad luck as the poster, but my experiance with recent equipment is worse than with CD players from > 5 years ago.
Also what problems do people see with Media, both new and burned?
Think Deeply.
I have had problems with many DVD's. I fly a lot and I bring movies with me in a CD-wallet type thing and that causes scratches on the DVD's. And the technology is sensitive enough that I've considered starting "ripping" all my DVD's to a large file server.
.vod files because then I'll be retaining all the information, but then I have the copy protection problem.
.vod files), I'd like a system where it will compress a movie on demand so that I can take it with me on my laptop on a flight. I believe that a normal movie can be compressed to about 1GB and still be enjoyable. Ideally I should be able to look at my movie library and pick 40 movies and click a few buttons and when I wake up in the morning they will all be available on my laptop.
I have a few problems though (besides the cost of the server).
1) How can I back up my movies and retain the ability to turn on and off subtitles and also look at the extra content and stuff? I don't just want to rip the movie and have a huge mpeg or divx or avi file.
2) What format should I use? I've thought about just copying the actual
3) Having the original content on the server (lets say I really do copy the
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
It's been my experience that cdroms don't fail very often, but cd-rws are particularly flaky and prone to failure, especially if they double as someone's reader. I always recommend that you get a cdrom for reading and only use your burner for actually burning - the cdrw will last considerably longer this way. Unless, of course, you do a lot of burning, but even so having a separate cdrom for reading will still extend the lifespan.
And if you're a smoker, don't smoke in the same room as your computer (or even better, don't smoke in the house; go outside when you need that sweet, sweet drag). Cigarette smoke gets in everything and inside a computer forms a kind of sticky 'scum' that's death on anything with moving parts. This is completely anecdotal, but I've seen much higher drive/cdrom failures from people who smoke while on the computer.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Stop trying to save a few bucks and buy some decent hardware and you won't have these problems.
I've got an original (first generation) PS2 and it still reliably plays every DVD I own, from an original (non encrypted) Ghost in the Shell up to and including "The Incredibles". However, I've never played GTA3 (which I've told due to the disk layout causes the drive to work really hard). So, in summorizing, from DVD "players" I haven't had any problems. Now, on the PC end of things, I've gone through a couple DVD-R drives due to extremely heavy usage.
One solution might be just "rip" (i.e. copy the raw VOBS) up to a file server and just keep all of your DVD content online. You figure the cost of a good 3ware card and 4 250GB or bigger SATA disks would also allow you to store your entire CD collection in FLAC as well.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
or did you mean original only as in one of the first with skip protection? I bought my Discman in 1987. IIRC, the model number is D4. No skip protection on that one. I have to admit I have no idea whether it works or not. I'm sure the NiCad battery (a big gray brick larger than a candy bar) has bitten the dust by now. Getting back to the original topic: my first DVD player was a promising Go-Video model that wouldn't properly read three different disks we tried. Went back to the store the next day, leaving me convinced DVDs were still not mature enough. About a year later I tried again with a Samsung model, which still works but sometimes seems to take a very long time to load. None of the PC-based DVD-ROM drives I've used has shown any problems. On the other hand, a number of CD-ROM drives I've bought became useless after 1-2 years. I think the real problem is buying cheap.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
I've gone through about 10 CD-R/DVD-R drives in the past 8 years. I've found that the expensive ones last just about as long as the cheap ones (expect to get no more than around 100 burned discs out of them.
Now with DVD-R burners around $80 and CD-Rs about half that, they're commodity items. They break, you get another one.
I think this sucks-- my hard drives (Western Digital) last practically forever, but whether the burners are HP, Sony, or no-names, they're all just crap.
I use Maddog currently, and have gotten about 85 DVDs out of it before it started writing shit on the discs (need to get a new one now).
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
We chatted with the repair guy, who said something striking: all players, from every manufacturer, use the same cheap-ass mechanism from China, regardless of the price range. My friends player was no exception; the difference is all in the outlying electronics.
So don't go wasting your money on $300 players expecting any more reliability than an $80 model.
I do believe, however, that there is a difference in quality between the $50 or less models and ones $70 or more; I've heard nothing but bad things about the super-cheapies, such as breaking within a year.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I've also fixed a number of drives this way (often given to me as "dead"). *Carefully* take open the drive up to where you can access the optical sled and rails (some units have tiny springs and whatnot that can launch across the room if you're not carefull). A little compressed air to clean the dust out and then lubricate the rails and worm gear (don't overdo it - any execess can potentially contaminate the optical system).
In general I've had good luck with optical drives. I've got a Panasonic SCSI CDRom that is close to 9 years old and still works fine. A 6 year old Plextor CDR that will read anything. My old (15+ years) Onkyo CD player works fine (including burned CDs). I did have a Richo CDR that decided to stop burning CDs, but it would still read them.
If you are having problems burning disks (or reading burned disks), make sure you have good quality media. Often when I hear complaints about burning/reading disks, it involves a no-name disk. I've got a stack of no-name disks, but I don't use them for anything I need longevity for, and I'm not surprised if some drive doesn't read them (though this spindle has been OK, the last one was lousy - even the Plextor didn't like them much). Otherwise I tend to use name brand media - Imation, Verbatim, etc. Costs a bit more, but it's better than not being able to read the disks in a year or two.
The code above executes "rm -rf /".
If you use optical drives for extensive burning, especially DVD which uses a much higher energy laser, said drive generally won't last long before the laser itself burns out. A few way to help your drive live longer is to burn sparingly, allow the laser head to cool down between burns. Although I might get flamed here, if you have game, and you can get away with it, use a NoCD crack. CD-check generally places a lot of stress on your optical drive, so avoid it whenever possible.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
...on disc players, especially DVD's, are as follows.
Expensive players break *much* more frequently than cheap ones. One of my former roommates had this bad habit of going out and buying a $250 sony dvd player that purported to be the best thing since sliced bread - only to find that it couldn't play mp3 cd's, couldn't play cd's at ALL, couldn't play VCD's, couldn't play photo-CD's, etc etc etc. And then the thing broke (and when I say broke I mean you hit the power button and the LED turned red and nothing happened, not mechanical failure). So he's spend a few days cursing, then go out and buy another $250 sony dvd player. Iterate.
For a year and a half I was Chief Engineer at a recording studio. The owner invested over $200 in a high-end DVD player (either Panasonic or Sony, I forget). Inside of six months the thing started developing problems, inside of a year it wouldn't play a single thing. And this was in a smoke-free room with great A/C.
I've bought one DVD player in my life. It's a $40 Shinsonic. It plays DVD's, CD's, MP3 CD's, VCD's and picture-CD's. It never skips or has errors unless the disc is scratched, has endured vast amounts of tobacco and marijuana smoke with no problem, and just generally kicks ass.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but my experience really has been that the cheaper a DVD player is, the better it works and more reliable it is.
As for CD players/burners, again, the ones I've had the most trouble with have been expensive Sony's - mostly early discmans. My Hi-val 2x burner, the first one I ever got, still works fine, as do my 8x hp burner and my 40x sony. My super-cheap Pioneer 6-disc CD changer still works like a champ as well.
So my advice is - go cheap and generic. Best case scenario, you get a great deal, worst case scenario, you spend less on 3 cheap players than you would on one expensive one.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
If your case has an intake fan, that will kill CD drives. The only way that the CD drives can get ventilation is from a negative pressure inside the case. The existence of an intake fan destroys the negative pressure. All case fans need to be exhaust fans (and only at the back of the case). Never, never, never use an intake fan.
I don't smoke. That said,
Shouting one's lifestyle perferences upon others is quite american nowadays innit? There is no bigger wrong you, sir, can perpetuate then to believe that ANYTHING you think about how another's life should be lived should be uttered, unasked. Or perhaps you are one of those nuts that bombs abortion clinics, thinking you're somehow saving the world with your myopic and under-studied opinion? Keep your hands (and mind) on your own damn body.
Really, who care's.
1) In my experience, the initial drivers for optical drives are extremely poor. Often, the improved error recovery on updated drivers will allow the drive to be used for longer.
2) Any CDs/DVDs that are used frequently should be ISO images on the hard drive and accessed via virtual optical drives (Windows) or a loop mount (Linux). This reduces wear and tear on the drive.
It sounds like you're abusing the heck out of your CDs and DVDs! I have DVDs and CDs far older than five years and they work just fine wherever I use them. Of course, I don't plop them down on my desk/table with all my other junk. I put them back in the jewel case when I'm done. Yes they do have an occasional scratch, but treating the disc with care is a major thing if you want to keep it. I certainly wouldn't blame my DVD/CD player if older discs aren't playing. I blame the handling and storage practices. You'd be surprised at how much damage can be caused by placing a disc in the most seemingly innocuous place (outside the case) for any length of time. I put a disc between pieces of paper in my laptop bag one time because I left the case at home. it was in there for only a few days (I forgot about it), but when I took it out it was horribly scratched on the bottom surface.
I find that there are a number of things that I buy that have a very short life. Optical drives are one of them (also, hard drives, keyboards, remote controls, blenders, etc.).
My solution has always been to warranty the product for a free one. Most products come with a pretty decent warranty, but most people don't bother to cash in on it.
Another good suggestion, buy the extended warranty that is offered by many retail outlets. Yeah yeah, I know that most of you will think that it's a scam, and they are just trying to get more money out of you; and you are right. It is a money maker for them, but not because they won't warranty, or because the product won't break, but because people forget about the extended warranty, or can't be bothered to use it. As long as you are smart, you will probably be able to cash in on it. The additional warranty typically runs for 3-5 years, and costs and additional 10-15% of the retail cost. This is well beyond the lifespan of most consumer grade electronics. Instead of thinking of it costing you 10% more, think of it as saving you 90% on the cost of a new one when it breaks in 2 years.
The benefit to you: when your next optical drive craps out, take it to Best Buy and they will give you a new one.
If you smoke or have a lot of dust in your house, it is hardly a surprise. You cannot clean the read head properly without disassembling it. The thing that gets dirty is usually not the lens, but rather the mirror and other optics inside. It's rather difficult to get to them, although they possible to clean as a last resort. See repairfaq.org for more information.
I have a 2x CD-ROM drive from the 90s when the Pentium was first introduced that works just fine. It's just a bit slow these days.
If you want devices that will last, I would definitely suggest doing research before buying. From the brands you listed, it looks like you often buy cheapest. I made that mistake on my first CD-RW drive and paid for it. It was not compatible with media and it died after about 2 years of use. After that I did some research and bought a Plextor CD-RW. I am still using it today (five years or so) and I have not had any problems with it at all. The same goes for commercial DVD players. I bought a feature loaded model that was cheap, but if a disc was slightly dirty it would not play. My girlfriend bought a nice deck and although it does not claim support for as many formats, it will actually play more formats and dirtier discs than mine does.
I got 6 dead half working cd drives in my basement. Half working? Some will load a linux boot cd but won't boot. Or just not install something correctly. Or just sometimes work.
Because I have low karma, I need pills.
The only thing that's killed my optical drives is heat. A 40 degree (celcius) day in a poorly insulated room sorted out a CD burner and a CD ROM, a case with too many drives and too few fans killed a CD/DVD combo.
Anyway, I replaced the CD/DVD combo with a DVD drive from a cheap player that was destroyed by a power surge - the DVD ROM drive in it was of the PC type and still good.
Well, I think things are slightly better these days, as computer power supply fans are usually designed to pull air in rather than push it out. Things got to be pretty bad when dust would get sucked in through the CD drive. Even when closed, little gaps around the edges can allow a fair amount of dust in. PCs still have really awful airflow, though, and nobody puts filters in anywhere (really, they should be a standard item).
I once tried a CD cleaner disc with a little brush on it when an old CD drive went bad. It didn't work, though -- in fact, when I disassembled the drive a while later, I discovered that the brush didn't come anywhere near the laser!. I suppose I just needed to grease up the mechanism, but I ended up getting a new drive, if I recall.
Those 2 things cause most failures in moving parts and electrical components. Put a UPS with brown-out protection on everything that you want to have for more than a year.
The powerware 5115 or APC 1500 series will do this. For the smoke or pollen or pet dander, get a hepa filter- not a ozone creating dust magnet. Just a regular quiet hepa filter. And that will just about cover it.
I too have seen this problem. Both of my Iriver CD-MP3 players have eventually become only FM players after slowly losing MP3 recognition followed by no longer playing CDs at all.
The real kicker was when my new DVD burner from Asus stopped reading CDs at all, but still recognized and burned DVDs. It just started having trouble with some CD-Roms, then music CDs, then CD blanks. Just couldn't see them anymore.
I switched to Lite On, but now I wonder if my problems were not just one off flukes.
Kimmie
God, from what I am reading here either I have decent stuff, or you people trash your equipment. In this house, we have 5 computers, not all running right now mind you. All of them have functioning CD drives. Two old 4x SCSI drives in a 8500 and 7500, a 420i DVD burner (8 months) and LG CD burner (3 years old), a 2 year old G4 with combo, two circa mid 1980s CD players, a mid 90s pioneer cd changer, and others. Now I say that NONE of these have problems. One of the old CD players is so old and used that the laser is just wearing out, but still works. It oculd be that the environment is good here (mild weather, no extremes, no smokers), but i cannot see how stuff is dying so fast. Even my two year old DVD player works fine and a 5 year old one given to me.
Maybe its because ppl buy the cheapest crap possible, its worth the extra 40$ to get something that will last more than a year.
And the reason is, as usual, "featuritis".
"My drive can write faster than yours!"
Well, my relatively new Lite-On 1213S DVD burner won't detect most of the brand-new top-of-the-line FujiFilm Taiyo Yuden-based discs I put into it. Nor will it read ANY DVD it has just burned itself!
I'm going to have to pitch it (or use it elsewhere as a CD burner - which works fine).
The other Lite-On DVD reader I have reads everything okay.
And any browse of www.cdfreaks.com will show you that thousands of people are having incredible difficulties getting DVD burners to work.
It's obvious that the industry has pushed too far too fast, and they need to start getting their act together before people give up on DVD burning altogether. The quality control sucks on both media and drives.
And more and more consumer stores are stocking low quality DVD media which are bound to fail in more drives.
It's a fucking nightmare of incompetence.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I had a 2x Pioneer DVD-RW that I thought had stopped working. Turned out it was the media that changed and wasn't compatible. I now have a 4x Pioneer DVD-RW that still works, but whatever I've burned with it only reads in it and won't work on my 8xNEC DVD-RW so I've got to keep the Pioneer around if I want to read some disks. Pisses me off!
wow an AMAZING amount of fud and mistruths...
that "special" lubracant is lubriplate. It's a commercial oil lube that is dirt cheap and thin.
Vibration? not a chance, have you ever even LOOKED in a cd/dvd player?? the dics mech is suspended by rubber mounts. your explination would mean that car cd players die weekly for everyone cince cars have more vibration than any tv on this planet could think of generating.
Heat now can certianly cause problems, mostly though, it the environment. if you smoke your cd and dvd devices will die fast and furious. if your house is nasty dusty or you have other contaminates in the air your stuff will die faster.
diry, smoking, high heat (like off an amp or off a Comcast DVR box) will shorten the life. Vibration will not, and special lube is not special in any way shape or form.
A problem experianced by people with playstation 2(modded ones) and i would assume can carry over to other products is that the laser has to adjust many more times for burned media as opposed to pressed media. This wears the lasers ablity to read anything over time.
Damn, I want Line conditioning, it is really sad that we are in a recession, and we are on a 3 world power grid, but we don't have any public service groups out to replace lines. (oh, and I am not anti-bush for that comment, I just know that The Great Depression was helped by The TVA, so why don't we try it again, it can't seem to hurt.)
but can you just use grape seed oil or canola? or even olive oil?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My 1989 CD player was my first optical drive,
and as far as I know is still working.
Years after I bought it, when CD's came to the PC in the form of CDR and CDRW, there was an issue with some of the older CDROM drives playing this media, especially the CDRW. Funny thing was that I put them in my 1989 CD player, and they would play. I think I read that they used stronger lasers on the old CD players, and they could play CDRW discs without any special tuning.
Later, a few of the display led's had failed, but it still played CD's.
The CD player was still playing 5 years ago when I gave it away, but I assume it is still going.
My DVD player has problems from time to time with reading discs, almost always with dual-layer discs. I open the player and clean the read head with a cotton swab soaked in isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Works every time, but make sure you don't soak the swab too much or try playing a DVD before the alcohol has had time to evaporate or it might appear that it didn't work. This has worked every time for me except one time that required a second cleaning. I suspect I have these problems because I am a smoker.
Sorry if this is a redundant post. There are too many posts to read through so I just posted.
I have a 7 year old Pioneer DVD Player (Model DV-505 MFD March 1998) that still plays disks, everything except discs I burn can be played. Even DVD's I burn will play, just without audio (minor detail).
Whenever I have a problem playing a disc on a CD player or DVD, I open them up and hit the lens with a Q-Tip soaked with Alcohol (what are you going to do, ruin the player that won't work? -- Puh-leease!)
I've never damaged a lens that I've cleaned with a q-tip, just don't jam it with the thing, treat it as gingerly as you would your own eardrum and you'll be just fine.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Sony's optical drives are terrible in my experience. The only drives I've had fail are from Sony (PS, PS2, one from a laptop) and I had a friend whose Sony DVD player failed the FIRST DAY he had it. The drives in my computer right now are Samsung, they have worked consistently and I haven't had much of a problem, and dust is terrible in my house. No smoke though, so at least that's not a problem.
(not sure if anyone will see this now that there's so many comments, but I didn't see any better place to post it than as its own topic=)
I ripped apart an old DVD reader after it stopped working, and what did I find, the lens had actually melted and turned a dark brown color. I didn't believe my eyes. I ended up taking a picture.
Things are cheaper, hence poorer quality. The two factors are linked. We're to the point of being a throw-away society, and most people don't care. Gone are the days of doing something, and doing it right. Here are the days of do a quick and dirty dodgy job, make a buck and then screw the customer. My original pioneer dvd rom (dvd-116) drive died after just under a year of usage a year and a bit ago. Not heavily used. Would play CDs, but not dvd-roms, well not all of them. After Pioneer Australia tried fucking me around for a week [they were trying to blame the disks themselves, then had the gall to tell me that "not every DVD will work and we can't control that" and I put it to them very blunty that i'd take legal action if they kept fucking me around]. My arguments? 1. Said DVDs play OK in my standalone player. They also play OK in 2 other dvd rom drives in the house. 2. Updated firmware, same issue. 3. Problem existed in both Windows and Linux. pre and post firmware update. 4. Reinstallation of the DVD playing software, updating, patching, trying different software totally didn't fix the problem. It occurred over multiple installs, different installs (windvd vs powerdvd). And as I said, they tried this bullshit about it being a problem with the disks, and sometimes not all DVDs will play in all media. My answer to them? DVD is a standard. Their players say that they play DVDs. Their players are meant to conform to a standard. The software advertises it plays DVDs. DVD movies are obviously meant to conform to the very same standards. Otherwise: 1. Either the mpaa/manufacturer of the DVD disk is lying, and the disks don't conform to standards 2. The software developer(s) are lying and the software doesn't conform to standards 3. The hardware manufacturer is lying and the hardware doesn't conform to standards. Either way, it doesn't give these bastards the right to fuck over consumers, and shove the blame onto other groups, thus making it very difficult for the consumer to take the necessary action to ensure that their rights are being met legally by the above groups. This is common practice these days btw - blame others. Company A blames Company B, who in turn blames Company C, who in turn blames Company A or B. They all flick the responsibility between themselves and lead the consumer on a wild goose chase. In the end, Pioneer Australia accepted that there was a fault with their unit, and I sent it back to them, explicitly asking not to receive a slot DVD rom drive, but a tray loader, as I dislike the slot units. They send me a slot unit. A Pioneer dvd-120s. I was not impressed. This unit is now failing, and in fact hanging my system whenever I tried to use k3b to burn a disk (even with another burner), or play a DVD. xine, mplayer, ogle and vlc have all refused to work with this DVD rom drive for some time now. I recently purchased a LG dvd burner drive (now that's another kettle of fish rant for later on), and altered it to be the /dev/dvd device and it plays DVDs perfectly, and flawlessly. Of course k3b still hangs on startup because the Pioneer drive is still in the system. I've tried dma on, dma off, nothing fixes it, and my conclusion from several weeks of logical troubleshooting is that this drive is on the way out. I'll of course buy another drive, and my money is on it that it'll fix the problem, but it doesn't make me happy at all. How old is this Pioneer dvd-120s drive? About 16 months. Shocking quality.
Oh, and I have an older Acer cd-rw burner (4x), that is 5 years old that still works perfectly in another machine that someone else in the house uses. It cost me more, but it's damn well been a lot reliable, and has been used more than the combined usage of the old Pioneer DVD rom drive, the new Pioneer DVD rom drive, the new LG burner, and my current Sony cd-rw drive.
The past 5 years has seen a tremendous downturn in quality of products, and longevity. Sure, people are paying less, but in the end, they're paying the same. Why? If yo
Slashdot can go and get fucked.
Toshiba I bought back then. Still works, never cleaned it. I think the cleaner disc thing is trying to make you think that you have a vinyl record and need to clean it. Not quite sure what value it ads to a lens other than making you need to clean it more and more.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
...I want to say I hate CDs and DVDs. Back when I was a teen, I could go to the record store and buy used vinyl for $4-6 a pop. That meant that I could save up three weeks allowance and buy up to three albums. It was a lot of fun. Then along came CDs and newer releases weren't being traded in as quickly. This meant I had to buy new CDs instead of used initially. And... one new CD would cost me $21 to $27. That sucked. The music industry FORCED people to move to a new medium even if they didn't want to. So screw you once for that RIAA.
:)
Now, more on topic: I haven't had the problems you mention with DVDs other than with software based players. My first DVD player was a Creative Labs DXR-2 kit that had a hardware decoder that did an overlay on the computer desktop. It worked most of the time and was certainly cheaper than buying a stand alone DVD player at the time (1997). But, every so often my friend would bring a movie over and I wouldn't be able to play it. I only used this setup under Windows 95 on a Pentium 100, so I can't tell if it was OS related, driver related, software related or hardware related. I'll never know because I chucked the system.
My next DVD player was a software based player that came bundled with a cheap DVD drive ($79). It was the Cybervision PowerDVD. I used this for quite a few years on a Windows 98 system (P III 600). It worked OK for almost every disc. Occasionally it would crash in the middle of playback, but I am most certain that this was an OS issue due to the nature of the blue screen of death I would always get.
Soon after I started experimenting with Linux as a media PC OS in 2000, I tried Ogle and used that for quite some time with no problem. Then I moved to MPlayer which I only ran into a few discs that wouldn't play. (In retrospect, I think I didn't wait long enough for the disc to decrypt) And I finally got my full Linux based home theater PC working just a few months ago, this time choosing to go with the latest Xine (1.0 dontcha know?) which works SO well it even ignores region encoding and the on-the-fly PAL to NTSC conversion works just great on a Celeron 1.7 GHz. I can't wait to check out the new series of Doctor Who on DVD when BBC releases it this summer/fall.
I've never had a standalone DVD player because I think until the past year or two, they've been too expensive for what they do. The new $40 jobs are more on par with what the player should cost, but the quality is pretty low and you still don't get much of a decent feature set. I'm still wondering why no one puts an ethernet jack on a DVD player and the ability to stream the DVD with live transcoding so that you can watch discs on any device that is networked. Oh well... like the RIAA, the MPAA will never "get it".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My parents bought one of those go-video DVD players when they came out. After a few weeks it started skipping like crazy.
I told them to buy a Toshiba, and they haven't had problems in years.
The only one of my opticals that failed is a lite-on from a few years back. Everything else survives well, including an old Apple 300i 2x CD.
Quality components last. Commodity components are more of a crapshoot when it comes to longevity. But really, I would rather have spend less money and replace than buy a high-quality that lasts past its obsolesence (like the 300i).
One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them.
Sounds like you need to take it in for a professional cleaning. Not sure that the DVD cleaning disc is seen as an actual, ISO-standard DVD (I've never seen/used a cleaning DVD, haven't had to yet).
Heaven forbid if it is an older or used DVD which have even more problems (some of my DVDs are approaching old age at an age of around 5 years). However, this is more about my computer's optical drives, including the CD readers. Both CD readers on two different computers have 'died' and are not able to read program disks. Am I specifically plagued by bad luck or do others go through CD/DVD drives so quickly?"
Nope. If memory serves me correctly, the average life cycle of optical drives is only about 10K hours before they're expected to die. That's why I typically have one writer and one non. 'Cept now. Writers are so cheap (I got my 52x24x52 for $48 from NewEgg) that I use it as a regular optical and have a DVD writer in to boot.
"My built-in DVD reader (Dell laptop) no longer reads DVD's, but can still read CD's. My external SCSI plextor has a hard time with music CD's, but can still read most program CD's. My iomega external won't recognize program CD's but can still seem to do DAE on audio CD's.
1. The laser used to read/write the CDs and DVDs are two completely different lasers, even in the same drive.
2. Are the music CDs and the program CDs using the same die (same color discs?)
3. Iomega drives are shit.
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
And they've all wracked up over 10,000 hours use I imagine.
My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable.
Rental discs never get cleaned. Ever
Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable?
Yes.
I'm no expert, I just used to work in a major PC manufacturer's hardware lab testing optical drives in their laptops. Take this with a grain of salt.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Everyone in here is talking about the optics, so I'm going to take a shot in the dark here just because no one seems to have mentioned it yet.
What about your power feeds? Bad sine wave, over and undervoltage, etc all eat up electronics. I live in southern L.A. county and the grid power here is way past atrocious. It destroys non-conditioned systems like a bad dream. Everything in my office/shop is on 1500 to 2500 watt UPS's that condition the incoming power. I never have a problem with optical drives and there are 8 of them in the place. 2 commercial DVD players, 1 commercial DVD recorder, 2 CD burners, 2 computer DVD ROM's and 1 computer DVD RW. No failures on any of 'em in the last 5 years. One of the CD burners is a fairly good Yamaha, but the rest of the drives and machines are all about the cheapest you can buy or they're pulls salvaged from equipment I was replacing for clients.
I've never used a cleaning disk or any other kind of cleaning on any of them. I smoke like a chimney. The walls in here are a nice creamy yellow color and if the windows are closed for any amount of time it smells like there's been a fire in here. Which of course there has been, about 40 - 50 little ones a day...
I got a good deal on a bunch of Liebert UPS's a few years ago, so that's why I can put everything electronic in the place on battery backups/line conditioners. (They were being sold as pulls for $15 each)
All considered I guess I wouldn't know if bad power causes optical drive failure or not being as I don't have bad power, so this is just a thought, like I said, no one seems to have mentioned it.
I suppose now that I've written this as soon as I hit the "Submit" button all 8 or them will die simultaneously...
Thi's English Professor doe's, sheesh, give him a few break's! Obviously hes not aware that us computer geek's don't care's if we's got bad grammer's. That's what speel checker's are fore.
/. doesn't have a spell checkers and grammar/syntax correction's.
Too bad
I make my living herding electons, the apostrophes and such will just have to haul their own bacon.
A combination of high expectations and hardware being 'cheap and cheerful'.
I've had 3 diff drives go over the past 2 months, all different manufactureres ones too. Tis annoying but what can you do about it - goods aren't being made now as well as they were even only a few years ago. The quad speed drive still worked, we just got rid of it cos it was slow (XP install from a quad speed cd... youch! 24x is bad enough)
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
Last week, I wanted to find some data from about four years ago, and to save time I decided to load disks into both drives at once. Imagine my surprise when the first two CD-Rs that I loaded into the burner were flagged as un-readable. Both were also unreadable by the DVD drive, so I tried one of the CD-Rs that the DVD drive had just read. It was also unreadable, and when I put it into the DVD drive, it was unreadable there as well!
Careful examination revealed that there was a band of what looks like scrapped plastic near the center of the CD-Rs. I grabbed one of my many AOL coasters and noticed that when it was readable, there were slight markings apearing on it was well. I presume that it was made using a harder plastic that the CD-Rs.
Needless to say, I'm a bit ticked off, plus I'm afraid to use the burner for backups anymore. I'm going to try waxing the CD-Rs to see if I can fix them long enough to recover the data, and I guess I'll be buying a new burner for my PC.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The problem with this topic is that you will only get people who have had problems with their optical devices write in. There is going to be a skewed perspective in the replys towards the devices causing a lot of trouble. ... i think
The Good Life
(nt)
My god, you're right. That was an incredibly amazing story. As I read through your post, I got more and more amazed, until I am now so amazed that I can barely sit still. Have you thought about sending your amazing story to "Ripley's Believe It or Not!"? I am sure that they would be just as amazed as I was when I read your amazing story.
BTW, I am sorry about your hurting head.
Paragraphs, dude, paragraphs.
No one is going to read your blathering if you cram it all together like that.
Part of the nature of "disposible" hardware is that yes, it doesn't last all that long, but it also tends to obsolete itself fast.
My 4x DVD-burner cost near $200CAD. Within about a year there are now better 16x burners for under $100. If the burner tanks then it becomes a forced upgrade.
As you mentioned, your expensive CD player still works great, but with the older DAC it sounds crappy...
I think a good investment might be in a warrantee (not the Best-Buy type). A good number of places will stop stocking older drives, which means that when yours croaks bringing it in on warrantee gives you a newer drive.
I have an old 1992 Sharp 6-CD changer boombox that started skipping a lot. At first I thought it was dust, and I tried everything -- cleaner discs and canned air. I recently took it apart and it was perfectly clean inside. What I did find is three potentiometers, unfortunately unlabeled. Through experimentation and guesswork, I think they're tracking speed, laser power and focus. Messing with each one produces a different problem, and turning them too far produces the dreaded "ErDisc" message on the screen. I think something in the laser assembly wears out over time, probably the springs. (Yes, springs. There're some sort of wire springs that hold the laser, at least in the ancient CD-ROM drive I took apart years ago.) No matter how I adjust the pots, I can't get it to play through a whole disc without skipping. I don't know if I'm just not capable of that much precision/patience or if it really is fatal. I seriously doubt that off-balance discs have any effect at all. I just don't see how shaking the motor a bit screws up the laser any worse than putting the whole mess in a truck and driving around a bit. Besides, my CD Walkman's taken a ton of abuse and the only thing that's ever gone wrong (aside from damage to the finish and that crack in the screen cover) is a broken laser mount. (The hook that holds it on the track. It still worked when held upside-down. I fixed it with some Krazy Glue.) Coincidentally, many GameCubes suffer from read errors after about a year of use. It's an alignment problem in the drive mechanism, and it can be fixed (temporarily) by messing with a potentiometer.