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?"

Comments

Compatibility

[Ryouga3]

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.

Just replace it

[beavis88]

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...

Re:Just replace it

[antifoidulus]

Just out of curiosity, where was your discman made, was it made in Japan or China?
I think the real problem is most people are so concerened about saving a couple bucks when they buy it only to have to buy a replacement later on. We trully are living in the "throw-away" society. Quality is just another buzzword in advertising anymore, it doesn't actually mean anything.
Not to troll here, but the quality of most manufactured goods in China SUCK unless the manufacturer actually forces them to do a good job. Maybe that's just my experience though, YMMV

Re:Just replace it

[saskboy]

"It isn't like these are items of high importance."

Tell that to the hypothetical mother who put her baby's photo CD into her drive, only to have the disk explode into a million pieces, or the student who can't get his photos or report off the disk, or the guy who put his family's Christmas present onto a DVD that isn't readable in any other players.

These devices are about the most important I/O device a computer has besides the monitor and keyboard.

You're not alone

[bmw]

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.

Re:You're not alone

[Dogtanian]

Reminds me of the situation with printers and ink.

Welll.... no, not really. There isn't really any manufacturer lock-in, and the discs are actually pretty damn cheap.

A spindle could include 100 discs, which is a *lot*.

Personally, my Lite-On DVD-ROM drive started giving me problems with CD-Rs and CD-RWs, to the extent that it won't read them at all (including those from reputable sources); and yet it gives no problems whatsoever with pre-recorded media.

Re:You're not alone

[Anonymous Coward]

although the $1500.00 Pioneer DVD burner I purchased in 1999 still burns at it's max 1X and has been through at least 1000 dvd's. the A-07 I purchased 5 months ago has died as well as the A06 before it and the A05 at work before that.

They simpoly dont make the junk as good as they used to.

I have a scsi HP cd burner that had to have burned an insane number of discs in our standalone copier and it still works perfect.

It's just the quality in the past 4-5 years has gone down the toilet.

Theres a saying that goes something like...

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for.

DVD cleaner disk?

[tricops]

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.

DVD Cleaners etc

[mikeleemm]

Don't use Drive cleaners or even compressed air, majority of the time it does more harm than good.

Here's how to solve your problem:

[Tibor the Hun]

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.

Re:DVD cleaner disc

[glesga_kiss]

I concurr. A cleaner disk is a set of brushes hitting the sensitive lens designed to delicately float on electromagnets at several hundred RPM(!). They are a last resort "my player is on it's last legs" scenario. Not for preventative maintainence.

Original poster, are you a smoker? The same buildup that makes white walls go yellow also builds up on the lens. You can clean it with the right tools.

I recondidition anything I have that breaks, and CD readers are a common one. You can often fix them by dismantling, cleaning, regreasing, then reassembly. It's common knowledge that mechanical parts are more prone to failure than solid-state, so the likelyhood is that in each of your devices there is a hardware problem.

Remember the original Playstation that had serious problems after a while? Problem there was that the little sled that the lens was on had a plastic runner. After X hours of seeking, it would wear down slightly, causing the lens to drop on one side. This is why turning the PSX upside down made a difference. You could fix that by filling in what had worn with some glue, filed down to make a smooth runner.

Re:yeah.

[mikecito]

On a more serious note - I still have a 6-disc cd changer from 1993 made by Sony. It works perfectly, and will play anything I throw at it, regardless of burn speed or whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if the disc changing mechanism actually goes before the disc reading mechanism. It's been used consistently for all 12 years, and still going strong. I'd say it comes down to a well made, and semi-pricey, cd player. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

Re:What's your environment like?

[TEMM]

Or, yknow, stop smoking.

Re:Hey Slashdot...!

[fm6]

He's probably not doing anything wrong. From the sound of it, he's a knowledgable, careful techie, and has just had a run of bad luck with a technology that's not designed to last. I could be wrong about that, but if I'm not, there's nothing to tell him but "replace them when they break".

I often carp about silly Ask Slashdots, but I consider this to be a really good one -- even though the basic problem is going unsolved. It's nice when we can help somebody, but that's not the main point. If you just want to solve a technical problem, there are plenty of places that can do a better job of helping you than Slashdot. What makes a good Ask Slashdot (or any other good Slashdot story) is when we end up talking about an issue that's important to all of us, debating its nature and consequences, and generall educating each other.

Re:the real problem

[Dogtanian]

The real problem is that they are all made in China

This was marked as flamebait, and it may well have been intended that way.

However, the reason they're made in China is because China is dirt-cheap to manufacture in.

They may well be capable of producing better quality drives, but that would require more quality testing (and so on) which is going to add to the price. And the consumer has shown that, everything else being equal, they will go for the cheaper drive.

I don't know how China would stack up if quality were a bigger factor, because I don't know the level of skills required, how many people with the necessary skills live in China, and so on.

In other words, would the cost of (increased) QA in Chinese-built goods be as proportionately cheap as the basic manufacturing cost in China?

Would it be worthwhile training people, or do enough people with the necessary skills (at the right price) live in China? Or would it make more sense to manufacture elsewhere?

Truth be told, I don't know; this is a can of worms. What I do know:-

(1) China is very cheap to manufacture in, and
(2) Long-term or even general quality/QA is far less important than the manufacturing (and hence retail) cost.

As I said, if (2) changed, it's totally unclear whether China would be a good bet or not. I suspect it might still be, but with a far narrower margin of competitiveness to its rivals. But (2) hasn't changed; so the goods with the lowest QA are produced in the country with the lowest manufacturing cost. Doesn't mean they aren't capable of better, it means that the market would prefer "cheaper" to "better".

bah

[CAIMLAS]

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.

From an old electronics repair tech..

[BlueStrat]

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

Re:Disposable

[SunFan]

If 20% of your production run dies within months of coming off the line, it costs you...

Not with the magic 90-day Warranty.