Short Lifetimes of Optical Drives?
Found on Slashdot on Friday, 15 April 2005
I have various optical disc readers from standard DVD players (apart from a computer), and both CD and DVD readers on one or more computers. My home stereo DVD's have been problematic for a while. One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them.
My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.
Oh yeah, optical hardware problems. I've had my share of them. Of the 7 CD drives I have here, only two are working. And I won't talk about the reliability of burned CDs; if I want to keep something stored for a longer time, I use a harddrive. On that note: harddrives tend to fail more than the old ones. Guess that's the tradeoff with cheaper hardware.