[Hidden-tech] durable DVD writer

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Does anyone have knowledge or experience about DVD drives with respect to writing lots of DVDs 
without burning out?

I've been producing DVDs of historical primary source material (see, e.g., 
https://www.worldcat.org/title/moreygraham-historical-letters/oclc/904725729) on my grandfather (see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Crockett_Graham). In March, I was about to head out to China for 
a three week trip, and I was pulling an all nighter producing DVDs of my latest project with 23 of 
his diaries. At 6am on the morning that I was leaving, my DVD drive took the usual length of time to 
burn a DVD (seems like forever), then it started the verification scan, took a long time and 
summarily spit out the DVD, saying it was unable to verify it. I went through 4 DVDs with the same 
result. This was from a stack of 100 good quality Sony DVDs that I had been pulling from for quite a 
while with no problems.

At the point that the drive failed, I had been burning DVDs non-stop for well over 12 hours. All 
told on this round going back a couple of days, I had burned something like 50-60 DVDs. Previously, 
I had used the drive to burn other DVDs.

This is not the first time I have had this experience. Maybe the third. (i.e. bought a new drive and 
then had it burn out.)

I'm using an iMac which I think is about 2014, running MacOS Mojave, with an Apple USB Superdrive.

Googling reviews of drives is pretty useless. They basically tell you they bought the drive, it 
hooked up without any trouble, it worked great, and it is built solidly; or something like that. 
They don't give long term wear and reliability. They don't say anything about non-stop burning 
sessions; just normal easy use with a brand new device. I asked this question of a "genius" at the 
Apple Store this weekend, and he didn't really have an answer. He suggested that perhaps I should 
buy a less expensive drive, because the internals would be the same. He said Sony made some pretty 
good drives, they just didn't have the aluminum case, etc. that the Apple drive has, but would be 
half or less the cost. It would be great to have a Consumer Reports "mean time to failure under 
continuous burning" and whether there are any drives with different, more durable, internals.


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Chris Hoogendyk

-
    O__  ---- Systems Administrator
   c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geosciences Departments
  (*) \(*) -- 315 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4