Short Lifetimes of Optical Drives?

lpq asks: "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. Heaven forbid if it is an older or used DVD which have even more problems (some of my DVDs are approaching old age at an age of around 5 years). However, this is more about my computer's optical drives, including the CD readers. Both CD readers on two different computers have 'died' and are not able to read program disks. Am I specifically plagued by bad luck or do others go through CD/DVD drives so quickly?"

"My built-in DVD reader (Dell laptop) no longer reads DVD's, but can still read CD's. My external SCSI plextor has a hard time with music CD's, but can still read most program CD's. My iomega external won't recognize program CD's but can still seem to do DAE on audio CD's.

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.

I took apart the IOMEGA, thinking it the easiest to get apart and took an air blower to the lens, but looking at it under a magnifying glass, I can't see a thing wrong with it. It still won't load any program disks, and kicks them back out as unreadable.

One computer is in my bedroom, the other in my living room with both commercial DVD players being in the living room (one used to be in bedroom, but with reliability issues of the older one in the living room, I moved the one in the bedroom out to living room. I still have to switch cables frequently depending on the DVD, as most play on the Digitron, the Sony seems to have poorer error recovery.

Is there anything I can do for maintenance. Air-canisters seem fairly limited in effectiveness and I've verified, at least in the IOMEGA external USB, it wasn't a scratched lens or at least nothing visible under magnification. This is really starting to drive me a bit crazy. It doesn't seem like I should have to replace these things so often.

My parents bought a new DVD player, and 2 out of 3 movies they tried to rent to play were unplayable. They are in their 70s-80s, so they just didn't want to bother with such unreliable technology.

It concerns me to hear about higher capacity DVD's, since with greater density, errors will affect wider areas on the disk. I'm always careful not to touch surfaces of CD's/DVD's but I don't know if the higher density DVD's will be very stable for movie or data storage if they don't do something to improve error recovery.

What do other people do for optical disk drive maintenance? Do other people have to replace them every 2-5 years because the drive is no longer cleanable?

As for video DVD's, should I just be resigned to play errors on almost 50% of DVD's -- usually they won't play on at least one of my players. What about bit-rot on the DVD's. Should I also be resigned to the fact that a DVD purchase is really only a temporary (5 +/-2 year rental) before it becomes unreadable?

The more egregious DVD problems have been with new, multi-CD series, where maybe one disk out of a 6-disk set (Buffy-season 2), Stargate Season 7, just won't play? It's a pain when they are gotten via mail-order even if they are a reputable dealer, since in both cases I've had 1 out of the set be bad, it was the last disc which I didn't get to for a few - several weeks.

What am I doing wrong?"

DVD cleaner disc

[SpudB0y]

Stop using a cleaner disc.

Laptops

[keesh]

I've had two ultrabay optical drives fail on my ThinkPad. Both failed just after the year's warranty expired. One won't play anything at all, the other will play and burn CDs but refuses to read any DVDs (I get repeated DriveSeek errors for DVDs). Very annoying, considering the price.

Brands are sometimes worth extra cash

[Jeehoba]

I dont know if this is the case, but sometimes spending the extra buck on a plextor [plextor.com]is worth it. They aren't cheap but I have never had a problem with one. Some of the other value lines like I would find at a rock bottom price on pricewatch [pricewatch.com] haven't been as good to me.

Re:Just replace it

[drinkypoo]

Plastic gears are just fine when your drive system involves a belt resembling an o-ring.

My 2 cents

[ceeam]

Don't know about pure "reader" drives (except in standalone players, anybody uses them yet?) but modern burners in my experience tend to gradually go down after ~500 disks (you may not even notice that if not using some testing tools). And that's nothing to be surprised about - you get what you buy - these things work on the edge (why do you think after you burned 10 disks in a row the last ones are so hot?), they are made of cheapest components possible, and they cost $60 for a high-speed DVD burner. OTOH - earlier TEAC drives, like W58E are still going OK around me (maybe done several thousands burns and used as reader all the time). But they costed $150+ (multiply by 2 to account for inflation) and they weigh around a kilo (~2pounds).

BTW, nowadays, I tend to buy Sony/LiteOn.

Re:You're not alone at all.

[jandrese]

Yeah OEMs LOVE to stick the cheapest drives possible on their systems. Even the high end IBM servers we have at work have the crappiest CD-ROM drives I've ever used. The part I scrounge out of systems that I'm disposing of is the CD-ROM, since I need so many replacements for the ones that fail in the lab. It's a real pain in the butt. On the other hand, I bought a 4X CD-ROM back when that was fast (1995 or so), and it still works like a dream. I have an old SGI with a 1x CD-ROM (and an old Macintosh (Sony) 2x CD-ROM) that work great, of course they need those annoying caddys...

On the other hand, for what you had to pay for those old CD-ROMs, you could buy 5 or 6 cheap nasty knockoff drives today, and the cheap ones are a heck of a lot faster.

Re:Here's how to solve your problem:

[ceeam]

Who modded this funny?! The toothpaste "trick" works really well with DVDs (on rented disks, for example; if you bother). Just don't try that with _CD_s, because the "data" layer is on top of the disk and you can damage _that_ while trying to polish "mirror" surface on the bottom. DVDs are two layers of plastic with data surface in-between them - that's the cool thing they've done about them. So - if your DVD disk does not read - put some toothpaste on it (with water), polish it with your _fingers_, don't use abrasive materials, of course. Wash it with the kitchen goo afterwards to remove grease. If successfully done, don't forget to copy the data to the new disk.

My $2 (adjusted for inflation)

[Reziac]

1) Don't use cleaner disks that have the little brushes; they can knock the head out of alignment. As a last-ditch for a dead drive, you might try one of the cleaner PADS, but even so that is not something to do with a working drive.

2) Make sure the case has positive air pressure inside (simplest way is to have one more intake fan, placed at least halfway up the case, than it does outflow fans), to keep air flowing OUT through the various drive orifices. I live in the dusty desert with house cats, and even so, thanks to their intake fans, my systems stay nearly white-glove clean inside.

3) Make sure the case has good cooling; some CDRWs are extremely heat-sensitive.

4) If you smoke, quit. Cig smoke residue is very hard on computer components. (Damp ocean air isn't much better.)

5) DON'T put labels on burned disks; there is no way you can align them exactly enough to avoid throwing the disk out of balance, and that can eventually damage the drive's alignment.

As to personal experiences:

ALL Yamaha CDRWs I've seen to date (20 so far, both SCSI and IDE) have died prematurely, due to overheating that eventually warps the laser out of alignment.

But otherwise, they're pretty damned durable. Right now in everyday use I have:

-- Plextor 24x CDRW (2001)
-- LiteOn 52x CDRW (2002)
-- LiteOn 48x CDRW (2002) -- has burned over 1000 disks (with occasional all-day marathons).
-- Acer 50x CDROM (2000)
-- Mitsumi 4x CDROM (1995)
-- LiteOn 16x DVD (2002)

Plus a whole bunch of CDROMs (Panasonic, Sony, various generics) in other boxes, that date back as far as 1994, and still work. Also, I've *never* seen ANY LiteOn unit go bad, and most clone dealers will say the same.

The only optical drives I've had die were three Yamaha CDRWs (see above), and one ancient Panasonic 2x (1994) that lost its drive belt at age 6, tho it still worked otherwise.

Re:DVD cleaner disc

[BobPaul]

Agreed. Clean the lense manually with a foam-tipped cotton swap and some good +90% Isopropyl alcohol. I've had bad luck with cleaning disks, and cleaning manually often does the trick.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to blow canned air directly on the lense, either.

Also, stop buying home theatre DVD players. They suck. I've not gone through as many as people I know, but they don't seem to last nearly as long as anything in my computers. Build a myth TV system with quality Plextor or Lite-on drives... had good luck with both of them.

Otherwise (and for the general consumer) there isn't much you can do. Most of this stuff is cheap garbage, and that's unfortunate.

MTBF is key

[Slayback]

Look at the MTBF of a drive or player before you buy it. You'll notice that the more expensive one probably has a higher MTBF. Sadly, that spec is becoming harder and harder to find pre-purchase. If you need, you could probably download the product manual and it should be listed in there.

As a side note, anyone notice the HUGE difference between a caddy drive and tray drive? I hung on to caddies as long as I could just because the drives were bullet-proof.

That depends...

[IcEMaN252]

...on your usage pattern. I work in the operations department of a television station, and we regularly (once a month) use a cleaner disk on our DVD burners. But then again, we have dirty dvds going in non stop every day.

Best Way to have a long-lived Optical drive

[JawzX]

Is to pay a lot of money for it.

Dust and pollen, smoke (a really bad one!) do all shorten the life of a drive, but the REAL kicker is cheap-ass mechanisms. Anyone can buy a $1 laser diode and build an optical pickup, but these cheapo diodes are, well cheap crap. Just like LEDs (see earlier /. article from today) laser diodes dim over time, cheap diodes dim faster, and often have a lower voltage bias set because they can't handle as much power. The lower initial voltage makes them go out that much faster.

Beyond the cheap diodes used in so many cheap electronics, the mechanism design itself is important. a good laser pickup will be SEALED. Many cheapo pickups have the internal guts of the pickup exposed to air, that means not only is the objective lens going to collect dust, but so is the prism, colimating lens, mirror and photo-diode face. Thats no fewer than 5 extra surfaces to collect dust, pollen and smoke (Did I mention that smoke is REALLY bad?) Spend about twice what the cheap ones cost and you'll get a unit that lasts twice as long.

I have a Mitsubishi CD player that cost over $2500 in 1988, it STILL WORKS PERFECTLY! Not only that, but it reads CD-Rs just fine too! It sounds like crap 'cuz it's got first generation DACs, but the high quality laser diode and sealed mechanism have shown thier supperior resistence to the vageries of time. The 1x(!) CD drive for my SUN 3/110 (manf. date 1989!!!) also works perfectly, and that sucker probably went for almost $4000 new.

Cleaning and re-alignment are both do-able and can correct the sorts of problems outlined here, but unless there's solid engineering and quality parts behind the lens it's not worth bothering.

Another thing you get with a more expensive drive is better error correction, both HARDWARE and SOFTWARE. Many cheap drives have a set-screw for sled angle and tracking linearity, the best drives have self-adjusting mechanisms. Also, better drives will have wide-range variable power controllers for the laser instead of just a couple switched resistor pre-sets, this allows the drive to more accurately correct of the tranmissive and reflective changes in the surface of the disc. Even basic drives have pretty good "groove tracking" but being able to correct for optical variations is important too. Good error correction software is also important. A nice buffered oversampling drive should be ABLE to read through a pretty decent size scratch wihout issue. But drives with tinny buffers and poor re-read capability will choke on the smallest scuff.

P.S. RE: celaning discs... Those little brushes don't pack enough force to alter alignment on most drives, unless they are cheap-crap or spin up to 52x. The lens itself is on a floating electromangenticaly aligned sub-frame, so it can get bashed arround by those brushes quite a lot without problems. The real issue with cleaning discs is that they just don't do a very good job. They are OK preventative maintenance, but once the lens gets dirty enough to start effecting the drive's ability to read discs, you'll probably need to go in there with an Alcohol dampened q-tip. Also, smoke residue (Did I mention this one is the worst?) is quite sticky and will not redily come off without a little alcohol.

My 2-cents.

similar problems

[bigbigbison]

I had similar problems with early cd burners from a couple different manufaturers. They wouldn't play certain kinds of disks like the ones that come on gaming magazines or wouldn't recognize data on a cd-r that they just burned.

I've had a bit of trouble with my set-top dvd players, but not much. Of course they are so cheap now I've managed to get 3 of them (not counting the ones in computers) so I can usually manage to get a disk to play.

I agree with others that the lens alighment seems to be the likely problem. Years ago I had a portable cd player that would skip all the time so i took it apart and there was a thing in there that looked like it had a screwdriver slot, so i put one in and twisted it. Put it back together and it worked a lot better from then on. I'm not sure I would reccomend taking it apart unless you didn't mind breaking it completely.

Re:DVD cleaner disk?

[drinkypoo]

The normal way to clean a lens is with a foam swab and denatured alcohol. As long as you don't damage the suspension wires you're fine. The CD is not spinning that fast in audio mode (or even 1x DVD, like a commercial player) and the brush is extremely insubstantial. All it's really there to do is brush off dust.

Re:Just replace it

[silentbozo]

Actually, some component DVD players use a standard IDE drive. Before you toss your player, crack it open and check to see if the drive has an IDE connector on it. If it does, you might be able to sub in a replacement drive.

Re:Just replace it

[JaredOfEuropa]

I'll typically just buy a new one.

Yup, and it's no biggie since these days you can get players for 50 euros that have pretty good audio and video quality. Still, I feel bad about throwing away an old piece of equipment, even a broken one.

For what it's worth, my plastic 45 euro Chinese DVD player has far outlasted my 350 euro JVC player, and has seen a lot more use too.

Re:Here's how to solve your problem:

[Tlosk]

Actually toothpaste is an abrasive, which is why it works so well at polishing off the scratches. The main non water ingredient in any toothpaste is hydrated silica, or sand. This is also why dentists tell you to use a soft bristle brush and not brush too hard because if you really grind the paste you can damage the enamel.

Re:DO NOT EXECUTE PREVIOUS SIG

[puetzk]

Almost right. It does rm -rf ~ instead, which is perhaps worse as it's more likely to work :-)

decomposed in detail for the morbidly curious: http://puetzk.org/projects/perl-sig-trojan.txt [puetzk.org]

I had to put it at a URL, as describing obfuscated perl without pissing off the lameness filter is hopeless. Maybe it's trying to tell me something...