I now have my second dead LiteOn SHW-160P6S PS0B. It will no longer recognize the presense of a blank disc in the drive. It therefore will not burn anything.

I am so fed up with looking for a DVD Burner. All I am asking for is a drive that can reliably burn DATA DVD-R and DVD+R at 16X and DATA DVD+R DL at 8X. The rest is gravy.

I have tried Verbatim blanks, Fuji blanks, Sony blanks, Memorex (gag!) blanks, Windata blanks. I read reviews of Plextors, LGs, Sonys, LiteOns, Samsungs. Expensive drives, cheap drives. It does not seem to make any difference, nothing seems to have a good rep for working reliably. I find complaints about every unit I've researched. I know that there are always going to be a few duds in every production batch. I know that there will always need to be firmware upgrades. But I cannot find even one drive that the majority of user reviews are positive.

Could someone please tell me if they have a drive that will burn DVD-R and DVD+R at 16X and DVD+R DL at 8X and last more than 2 months?

Thanks for your help.

Join the life of electronics Have you looked at LG's or Pioneer's?

Edit:
Answer Arachne's Q's

Can I just ask...does it recognise pressed CD/DVD?

If it does, there may be a software reason for the problem - I'm guessing you tried booting from a Windows/other OS disc?

Do you have Alcohol installed at all, if the problem's only with blank discs?

Aside from all the questions, I find LG are good for longevity

I am sorry that you have had such misfortune. I have had better luck with Liteon drives. I have four drives made my Liteon. The oldest one is five years old, the newest one is only four months old. All of them are still working fine.

Are you sure the drive is dead? As Arachne says, the problem could be software related or possibly a hardware fault with another part of the system like the IDE cable, power supply, IDE controller or drivers......

One of the best tests for an optical drive is to boot from a bootable CD or DVD.
A Windows installer CD or a live Linux CD/DVD like Knoppix or Damn Small Linux is a handy tool for this job.

If you can't coax it back to life. You could try LG or Pioneer. If you are trying
to avoid Liteon, you should be aware that many of the current drives on the
market are rebadged Liteons. i.e. some models by Philips, Benq , HP and others.

Thank you for your replies. In order of the posts...

Yes, I looked at specifically the LG GSA-H10L and the Pioneer DVR-710A. Both seemed to have complaints against them that were of consequence though no more and no less than Samsung SH-S182D, Liteon SHM-165H6S. Sony DRU-830A, Plextor PX-760A, and Plextor PX-800A.

I have multiple hdd's in my system, (SCSI and IDE) that I can turn on and off independently. I have Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro. I have Nero 7.8.5.0 and the latest version of Nero 6.5x. I tried all permutations I could think of to get the darn thing to recognize blank DVD's. Multiple reboots, power down and power up - nothing worked. I do not have Alcohol installed, in my pc or in me :-) I tried your suggestion to read an already written dvd. It took about 5 minutes of churning, grinding, buzzing and led flashing, but finally, the contents appeared in Windows Explorer. Then I stuck in a blank dvd+r and VOILA it recognized it.

I am happy it is now working, but for how long? Is this normal behavior for a dvd burner, or is it only TOYING WITH MY SANITY? :-)

I too have had good luck with LiteOn drives in the past, and have several of their CD-R/W drives. The others are still working fine for me as well.

I was sure that it was dead as far as recognizing a blank and writing to it, but now (see text above) I am not sure what to think. :-)

If anyone reading this thread has a positive experience for more than two months with an LG and/or Pioneer unit could they please post a model number.

Does the lack of "Support for Disc Error Checking with Third Party Software" diminish the reliability of the burned discs created with a dvd burner?

Thanks again.

It's got nothing to do with brand, optical drives are just tempermental.

I've had $160 plextor 716A's die in less time than cheap samsungs, and a 2x sony cd-recorder from 1996 that still works...

Sometimes they just stop working.....

Bad batch, bad working conditions, bad media, who knows.

I was happy with both my old LG GSA-4163B and my recent LG GSA-H10N crossflashed to H12N.
The successors to these drives are the LG GSA-H42X and H44X.

Try running CDGONE in my sig, had same problem in a LG reader and this fixed it.

It's toying with your sanity

Yep, had my 4163B (LG) for about 2 years, and the 4167B for a little less than that - also had my external E10N for several months now - they all work

I find with quality media (Verbatim, TY), the LGs tend to put out great burns (apart from TYG01 on the 4167B, but that's another story) - so I can't say I'm too bothered about the lack of scanning on those drives.

Two drives dying in a short period of time might (unless they were from the same production batch and thus similarly predisposed) indicate a problem with your PC's power supply unit. I don't see many problems with Lite-On 6S series drives dying prematurely on this board.

i have 2 X benq go south on me. and 2 NEC.. no idea why... since then i bought a samsung and it's actually quite durable... i think the next one i'll just buy another samsung.

So much for the theory that you get what you pay for.

Does LG sell models that are really made by someone else?
Do all LG's not permit scanning?

Thank you for this. I will give it a try. I still think that I will need to get another drive as a spare just in case this one goes irretrieveable. Maybe I should really abuse myself and try to find a 5.25" external SATA enclosure to connect a SATA based DVD burner externally. Then I would really be a gluton for punishment.

Like most folks I can find Verbatim at a local retailer, but find TY's requires depending on dedicated unmarked investigating consumers and the Label Brand not changing subcontracters.

I wish that TY would just sell direct. It would make life simpler.

Thanks to all.

LG is made by LG... but they have factories in both Korea and China. The best LG drives are made in Korea as the quality control is better. It's the luck of the draw as to which you will get.

LG drives do not scan.

TY does sell direct... the best place to get them in the US is Rima:

+R
http://www.rima.com/Merchant2/mercha...ory_Code=DVPTY

-R
http://www.rima.com/Merchant2/mercha...ory_Code=DMRTY

My vote goes unambiguously for Pioneer DVR-111D. Don't know about LGs as I don't have any. (IMHO: ) But I surely can't recommend Pioneer DVR-112 series drive. Speaking of Pio 112:
1) I don't like the ugly NEC-like PIF spikes in the majority of scans of the discs recorded by 112 at high speeds; 111 doesn't have this problem, though it is a 16x, not 18x drive. However this is not a valuable reason not to buy it (for some people, but not for me).
2) Quality Control of 112 series seems to have gone down awfully -> lots of complains.
So if you have a chance, better get a 111. I will get another one when I have enough money for everything I need besides it ... If I'm not too late by that moment...

Hmmm, the OPC issue (or PIF spikes) is more firmware related IMO as Pioneer 111 is also NEC chipset based, Plextor 755/760 suffers from this aswell, though it is Sanyo chipset.

If it is only 4 months old it is still under warranty. Contact LiteOn. I have owned nothing but LiteOns and have had good luck with them all.

They were from the same production batch, unfortunately, because the first one was bad right out of the box. Would not recognize, read from, or write to any type / brand of re-writeable dvd.

The drive's resurrection (see text in thread above) directs me away from ps issues, but it was a good thought.

Well at least someone is making their own products. Sometimes I feel like I should pin on a name tag with someone else's name and outsource myself because every company seems to feel someone else should do all of their work.

Thanks for letting me know about TY's direct from Rima. I have not looked for TY media direct for a long time and I guess that they finally got the idea to sell on their own name. I used to hunt for Fuji CD-R's in just the right packaging, then that all changed. I wonder why they do not show any rewriteables or dual layer discs?

Is it that any zone speed drive will throw spikes during write, or are some implementations sloppier than others?

Who is this guy/gal who works at every high tech company who decides "Well, we had good quality control and people bought our products with enthusiasm. Now let's go to crap quality and sucker them, so that they will stop buying and bad-mouth us forever more!"

Does anyone every "screw up" and find a subcontractor who actually makes a product better than the original company?

My experiences in returning computer products for warranty service usually result in:
a) Getting back my own product beat to hell and still not working.
b) Getting a refurbished unit that has been beat to hell and does not work in some different way.
c) Getting back nothing and having the repair department tell me that they never received it.
In fairness this was not with LiteOn; several other big name computer gear companies, but the thought of going through the process is not appealing. Maybe that's what these companies are hoping for. Maybe it is called the three-card-monte repair strategy.

Sometimes I feel like going back to Balsa Wood model airplanes. At least when they crashed and broke apart you did not have to wonder why.

I think it could be caused also by bad hardware calibration. I think this variant is closer to the truth. However, Pioneer here can be "excused", I globe: they just gave up DVD standard and now concentrate on BlueRay . That's commerce. And politics.

Fair enough but, how many people will spend $1,000 USD on a Blu-Ray DVD drive vs. how many people will buy a $40 - $140 USD DVD-R/W drive. I am all for R&D but a business has to support its customers or else there is no cash flow to fund R&D.

Syquest was a great company till they started selling defective drive after defective drive and then they went under very fast. Margins are very low in this industry and it doesn't take long to put a company under if it screws up in a noticeable way.

Maybe this is why the drives are so prone to failure, so you buy more drives to offset the very low margins

The Pioneer 111 is best for quality DVD burns IMO after reading reviews of all drives. I also have a Pioneer 107D that still performs flawlessly after 6 to 7 years of use.

Is the 107D really that old?

I got the 107D shortly after its introduction which may be less time, but it's burned many hundreds of backups and continues to perform without any problems.

I bought my first DVD-RW drive (Liteon 411) in Jan 2004. I think the
107D was the latest & greatest at that time. The old Liteon is still
working well. It cost 4-5 times as much as the current generation of
DVD-RW drives.

The 107D was my first DVD-RW drive and cost me about $120 if memory serves, and they were around $170 when first introduced. NewEgg now has many of the most current drives around $35 plus or minus a few bucks, and I got a Sony DRU-120C which is a rebadged LiteOn SHM-165P6S from CompUSA for $25 after $20 rebate about 4 weeks ago. I plan to get another of those Sonys when that special is repeated for future LVW-5005 recorder burner replacement. FYI that Sony is the only drive past LiteOn 1693 models of which I'm aware that doesn't have the freeze on fast forward problem when used as 5005 burner replacement.