[Hidden-tech] durable DVD writer

[DM Cook]

My experience has been that matshita (Panasonic) drives have the best
longevity unrelated to continual burn time, but that drives made by Sony
have the best reliability for continual burning without failure. No device
is flawless, however, and this info is gathered from 12 or so years of
experience ending in 2015. It’s entirely possible that it’s no longer
accurate.

I would avoid any product produced or packaged by HP, as a rule.

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 1:24 PM Chris Hoogendyk via Hidden-discuss <
hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
> --
> ---------------
>
> Chris Hoogendyk
>
> -
>     O__  ---- Systems Administrator
>    c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geosciences Departments
>   (*) \(*) -- 315 Morrill Science Center
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
>
> <hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>
>
> ---------------
>
> Erdös 4
>
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-- 

DM Cook
Instructional Designer & Technical Writer
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