[Hidden-tech] durable DVD writer

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 6 May 2019 14:02:35 -0400 Chris Hoogendyk <hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu> 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.

I've had NO such trouble with an *internal* SATA drive in a "PC" tower.  I 
have no idea how many DVDs I have burned (hundreds and hundreds possibly 
pushing towards 1000).  This is what info I have on it:

  Vendor: Optiarc  Model: DVD RW AD-7241S  Rev: 1.01
  
The *only* issue I am having with it is the tray eject motor seems to be 
wearing out.

> 
> 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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