How long should a DVD burner last?

[Regor21]

I'm curious. With normal use how long should a DVD burner last?

With my burner, I rip 5-6 DVD+Rw's per week and burn about 5 DVD's (Single and Dual layer) per week, plus 2 or 3 cd's /week.

I think that this is not excessive use. So, how long do I have before my burner starts to show problems?

I have a TSST TS653G and use IMGBurn.

[fritzi93]

When DVD burners were relatively new on the market and expensive, there were discussions here occasionally on expected service life. I don't recall there was ever much hard information; most of it came down to personal experience. Back then, folks also wanted to know what burners were "picky" about media, because again, they were expensive.

Plotted on a graph, failure rates for electronics typically display a "bathtub" curve. There is some "infant mortality", so to speak, then the graph drops steeply and remains low for the service life, rising again steeply as the majority of the units fail.

Now burners are a cheap commodity. Cheap to buy, also cheaply made, as cheap as possible. I always have a few on hand and if one dies, I shrug and toss it. Maybe some members here will have a better answer for you.

You might ask your question at myce, formerly cdfreaks. You'll probably get a lot of responses there.

[lordsmurf]

Less than 2,000 hours.

[hech54]

TSST drives are usually laptop drives. Laptop drives suck.
I have an old LG 4040B from about 2003 that still works perfectly.

[lordsmurf]

Nah, I've seen plenty of TSST desktop drives. I have one myself.
Most laptop drives are LG, and those are the very definition of "crap burners".

Your ancient LG 4040 was pretty good. Modern LG drives are junk.

[jman98]

I would suggest that you'd get 2 years out of your burner with some probability of getting more or less. It's impossible to say for certain. Note that inability to burn DL discs is often the first sign that the drive is failing.

TSST makes plenty of full sized drives. I have one and I'm pretty pleased with it. So far it has been very reliable.

[hech54]

Your ancient LG 4040 was pretty good. Modern LG drives are junk.

My "newest" LG is an H58N. Great burner - terrible (slow) ripper. It took me two minutes to rip ONE SONG from
a CD yesterday. Needless to say I put the CD into my LG4167B to rip the rest of the CD.

[budz]

Your ancient LG 4040 was pretty good. Modern LG drives are junk.

My "newest" LG is an H58N. Great burner - terrible (slow) ripper. It took me two minutes to rip ONE SONG from
a CD yesterday. Needless to say I put the CD into my LG4167B to rip the rest of the CD.

Yuh, cuz LG has all their dvd burners read speed locked at 6x speed. Dunno why they continue to lock it at that slow 6x speed. But on the other hand when you have a scratched disc the LG drives sometimes are able to read those types of discs. I still got my LG-H62L going strong! But then again I'm dvd burner whore!

[handyguy]

Some writers can be unlocked.

Mine last a long time as long as I keep the disks clean & laser clean too.

[orsetto]

I burn an average 8-10 discs per day: over the last four years the trend shows my newer burners tanking earlier. Used to be able to go about a year or more, now if I get 6-8 months I'm happy. As fritzi93 noted, burners are now a disposable commodity product: they are not designed with the slightest thought towards durability. And for $30-40, expecting anything more is probably unrealistic. On generic desktops this doesn't faze me, but embedded laptop drives or Apple Mac slot drives are a pain to replace and not quite so cheap.

Strangely, my most durable burner is a Sony USB 1.1 external CD-R unit I picked up for $249 in 1999, when that was considered a bargain. The USB Sonys were notorious for software/hardware glitches, and mine certainly had its share at the beginning, but it still works today when I'm asked to back up old Macs or laptops that only have USB 1.1 connectivity.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Most laptop drives are made by Panasonic and they don't last as long as 5.25" drives, not to mention rip as fast.
All of my old 5.25" IDE drives are still working, some are 10 years old.

[hech54]

Yuh, cuz LG has all their dvd burners read speed locked at 6x speed. Dunno why they continue to lock it at that slow 6x speed. But on the other hand when you have a scratched disc the LG drives sometimes are able to read those types of discs. I still got my LG-H62L going strong! But then again I'm dvd burner whore!

I just happened to have been playing a CD in that drive, with my headphones on (because the drive is also DEADLY quiet - and my wife was working and on the phone in the same room as me) and I said to myself, "I'll just rip these songs with this drive while the disc is in there - what the hell"
HA HA...I got fooled again. I forgot how pathetically slow that drive really is...

[[_chef_]]

Some writers can be unlocked.

Mine last a long time as long as I keep the disks clean & laser clean too.

Who has seen that coming? j/k

With burners so cheap these days, you won't really need to have to ask about their life times, I think.
LG has got a really great piece of the cake in the HH (desktop) burners market and also in the slimtype market since PAnso.../matSHITa were sin binned by most of all customers.

About "riplocks", you can never ever make all customers happy, install a riplock and they will argue about shit rip speeds, install it not, other will argue about noise issues in their HTPC systems.