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

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.

I've had weird issues, too

[Paladin144]

I had a Phillips Superdrive (4x DVD burner / 12x CD burner) that refused to play commercially pressed CDs. It was the strangest thing, because it could still read burned CDs, burned DVDs and regular, commercial DVDs. But if you tried to play a pressed CD, it would spin and spin. Sometimes it would recognize it if I ejected & put it back in enough times. Gradually, it got worse and worse until it didn't read any non-burned CDs. It still burned both CDs and DVDs just fine. I guessed that the laser was out of alignment or something. I replaced it with a 8x Superdrive and that has been working perfectly.

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?

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:What's your environment like?

[TEMM]

Or, yknow, stop smoking.

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".

Best Way to have a long-lived Optical drive

[JawzX]

Is to pay a lot of money for it.

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 /. 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.

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.