RE: Life of CD/DVD Drives? (OT)

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

On 15 May 2006 17:48, Lloeki wrote:

> On 15/05/06, Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) <gsw@agere> wrote:
> 
>> I've had this happen several times with standalone DVD players.  It
>> has nothing to do with amount of use or anything else AFAICT.
>> 
> 
> Most casual consumer IDE cd/dvd recorders are engineered to handle
> around 1'000 recordings. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure,
> STFWikipedia) of anything from cars to dishwashers is a Big Secret in
> the industry, but expect it to be just past the announced warranty,
> especially for low-end hardware. All these values are statistical
> though, so one might just fail at once when another might just last
> thrice the MTBF.

  Yeh, my experiences tally with what everyone's said: if a cheap cd/dvd drive starts to conk out after only a couple of years, or even less if you've been doing lots of heavy burning sessions[*], it's not surprising.

  It's down to the increasing use of low-cost mass manufacturing techniques.  And I guess it's not so bad if a burner costs forty bucks and lasts two years, but these new low manufacturing standards seem to have been applied across the board as the prices of peripherals have fallen over the years.

  Hard-drives used to be precision-engineered instruments: the one I bought for my Amiga in 1991 worked fine until 1999 without a single lost sector... then I decided to 'upgrade' it (I had almost filled up the whole 20meg :-D LOL) with a brand new WD (IIRC), and within 6 months the whole thing had died with a bearing failure[****].  Now, I know about keeping backups, but even so, I want a HD that lasts a LONG time.  And I am not happy with the new trend that you should expect and be prepared for your drive to crash catastrophically within the 6-24 months timespan.  But that's all you can safely expect from them these days.  How would you feel if all the CDs you burned got wiped when the burner conked out?


    cheers,
      DaveK

[*]     - Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum![**]
[**]    - Huh?  What?  Whatcha mean?  I'm just doing my bit to fight global warming[***], you suspicious-minded individual!
[***]   - http://www.venganza.org/piratesarecool4.jpg - RAmen!
[****]  - The most horrible noise in the world is that <GRAUNCH> you hear when your HD spins up that tells you you've got crushed balls all over your platter[*****] once again!
[*****] - </innocent> What?  What, already?  Sheesh, get off my case![+]
[+]     - My asterisk key just broke[++].
[++]    - Goddam' cheap mass-manufactured asterisk keys <grmbl grmbl...> back in my day you could type asterisks all day long and they'd never fail ... <mutter mutter>...
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