Short lifetime of DVD burners or bad luck?

[Observer]

Since January 2003 I've had 3 DVD burners that all worked perfectly when they were new but began to show signs of serious burning problems after a while.

January-May: Pioneer A05
I burned approximately 200 DVD-R before the problem began. Of the first 150 discs all but one was working perfectly but after I had used the A05 to burn approximately 200 discs, almost every new burn ended up with a useless piece of plastic. The quality of the burned DVD's became so bad that they couldn't be read in other units and tests with Nero CD-speed indicated that there were serious problems with the discs.

June-October: Pioneer A05
I started up with the same type and batch of DVD-R media, which didn’t burn successfully with the old A05 and every disc came out perfect. The problem was clearly not related to the DVD-R media that I had been using but to the old DVD burner. After another 150-200 discs also this burner became “worn out” and started to burn coasters. This time I decided to really test the unit and burned a couple of 2x DVD-RW discs approximately 100 times. After this “work out”, every new disc came out so bad that it could not be read back by the A05 itself.

November-December: Pioneer DVR-106
Once again I started out with the same type of DVD media that I used at the end of the A05 era and every new disc came out fine.
However, there must have been something odd with this burner because it began to fail already after approximately 50 burned discs.

I would like to know if someone else has seen the same trend or if it's just me that’s having bad luck. Maybe other people don’t burn as many discs with their equipment as I do, so perhaps I'm an exception. I'm actually using DVD's as a cheap storage of digital measurement data. I know that this is not the normal use of a DVD burner but I expected the lifetime of DVD burners to be somewhat longer.

[Kedirekin]

I would also expect a burner to burn more than 200 DVDs before failing. I have a different brand of drive (Plextor), I've only had it about 5 months, and I'm only now approaching 200 disks, but I haven't had a hint of a problem yet (knock on wood).

In your circumstances, I think I'd look for a common cause for failure.

Is there something in your working environment that might cause premature aging? For example, are you a smoker? Do you use a wood stove or fireplace often? Could there be something near your PC that's producing ozone (one of those funky air cleaner things - or a whole-house electrostatic air cleaner in your furnace)?

Is your PC very noisy? Perhaps it's a sign that your PC has excessive vibration, and the vibration is killing your drives.

Is power in your area dirty? Do you have lots of power outages? Do you use a UPS with a line conditioner?

Did you buy all your drives from the same vendor? Perhaps they had a bad batch of A05s, and you simply got unlucky with the 106.

The list of potential problem sources is probably endless, but you get the idea.

[SomeJoe]

I would tend to agree with Kedirekin, this sounds like an environmental issue, or something else wrong with the computer, i.e. power or mechanical shock/vibration.

We have a Pioneer A05 at work that is approaching 600 DVDs and 400 CDs burned. No problems whatsoever.

[JustinH]

a buddy of mine was failing hard drives like crazy. It turned out to be bad power in the room that he has the computer. He installed new outlets and ran new power lines into the room and no problems since.

[sarahjh69]

how about a faulty
PSU in the PC?

[arsmori]

Heat is a major issue with some cases/configuration.
They're cases you simply can't install a drive in the top bay. The air is stagnant and really hot and drives fail miserably. After the line quality/cheap 15$ PSU, that would be the first thing to check IMO.

[Observer]

It’s good to hear that other people have burned over 600 DVDs without any noticeable problem. However, I can’t see that any of the “explanations” of the short lifetime applies to this case. The reason is that the three DVD writers were installed in 3 different computers all located in different places. The PCs are all relatively quiet without any excessive vibrations or noise. The temperature inside the case is low, below 30 degrees near the top of the case and I haven’t had problems with any other piece of hardware in the computers.

[echooff]

I have burned about 400 disk in a year on my dvd burner. It's a Memorex. Surprisingly the only time I have problems is when I try to use Memorex disc. Go figure.

You didn't tell us about three computers in three rooms.