DVD burners......life in hours?

[Tom81]

How many hours can you burn on a DVD burner.....approx lifespan?

[johns0]

100,000

[jeex]

999,999 hours = more approximate

but seriously;

100,000 hours divided by 24 hours = 4166.66 days divided by 365 days = 11.41 years..

i would be very very surprised if my dvd burner lasted 11 and a half years. (is it eleven and a half or eleven and one half?)

[johns0]

Burner are like cars,they can last from a month to over 5 years,100,000 hours is just a rough guess from the manufacturers.

[elmotheteapot]

DVD Burners are relativly new technology, so its anyones gues,, most ppl will have replaced or a new technology like dual layer or bluray will have emerged before the burner gives up (in most cases)

[Tom81]

I have seen and heard numerous testimonies about burners going out in less than a thousand hours..... has anyone used a burner more than a few thousand hours successfully?

[handyguy]

Yep.

But the hours should be given in the back of the manual. Those are theoretical hours, they don't equal in practice hours. Otherwise the manf would have to run theirs for 11 years to test it so its just in theory.

[QuaiBoy]

For anyone who cares, Dan wrote a great explanation of MTBF halfway in this article half way down the page:
http://www.dansdata.com/raid.htm

"Assume you're using crummy drives with, say, a one in one thousand chance of failing on any given day. Further assume that you only check for failed drives once a day, so you've got that much of a window for a double failure to occur.

Assuming one drive's failed, the chance of the matching remaining drive failing is 1/1000 (there's a 1/500 chance that one of the other two drives'll fail, but that won't cause data loss unless its mirror dies as well), so you've got a one in a million chance of a data-loss failure on any given day.

One in a thousand, though, is a lot worse than the real failure probability of modern drives, even the alarmingly gigantic ones. Current drives are more likely to have something like a 500,000 hour Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) score.

This doesn't mean that anybody's tested any of them for 57 years, of course. The real drive lifespan is likely to be ten years, tops. The big number may just mean that the manufacturers set up, say, 1000 drives and tested them for, say, 1000 hours, (a rather more manageable 42 days or so). And at the end of that time, they had two dead ones.

The 500,000 hour MTBF figure, therefore, can be arrived at by saying that if 0.2% of your drives fail in 1000 hours, then all of 'em are going to fail by the half-million-hour mark. The drive manufacturers know that isn't true, and so does anybody else who knows how MTBFs are worked out, but it sure impresses the punters.

There are lots of other factors that go into MTBF evaluation for many companies - they figure in real-world data from returns, subtracting devices obviously killed by the user from the stats. Some of them therefore come up with Theoretical MTBF and Operational MTBF figures. But there's no standardised way to calculate any kind of MTBF, so you shouldn't put too much stock in it.

You can, at least, use MTBF numbers to work out the rough probability of failure in any given day over the sensible lifespan of the drive. It's probably going to be replaced, along with the whole system it's in, in a few years anyway.

If you take a 500,000 hour MTBF figure at face value in this way, it gives you a roughly one in 20,000 chance of a drive failure on any given day."

-Evan-