What's wrong with CD/DVD drives in general ?!

Hey all, this time I am curious: what's wrong with CD/DVD drives in general that they stop working (this may vary, i.e. it may be only partially or fully) after no more than two or three years of usage ??


You see, first I had a normal generic CD-ROM Hitachi LG Electronics drive (its specs say: Generic DVD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device, HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B) that wasn't able to burn CDs, and this one stopped working right after I bought my second drive, this time it was a CD-RW Lite-On drive (specs/serial: LITE-ON LTR-52327S (52x32x52) ), and with this one I could finally burn CDs, however, this one also stopped working after two years or so. IIRC it was that first it wasn't able to burn CDs anymore, then finally it started to refuse to recognize any media inserted.


So I finally bought a CD/DVD-RW drive (specs/serial: NEC, _NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A (48x32x4 ), and with this one I could finally burn CDs/DVDs, but similarly to the Lite-On drive mentioned above, it first wasn't able to burn CDs anymore, and now it finally also started to refuse to recognize any CDs, while luckily it still does recognize DVDs.


Also note that normally I don't even use them much, mostly occasionally for watching movies, while I copy full 700 MB files (i.e. movies), ISO images and other such "big stuff" to hard-disk rarely or rather almost never!!


Any ideas, are the CD/DVD drives poor quality in general or it's just me and my bad luck with them??!


thanks, stalker

 

design obsolescence

 

well i seem to have the same problem with them.
my dvd rom drive and my dvd rewriter drive went near the same time.
so i got them both replaced. sometimes i put in a cd i burn something on to it then it wont open unless i reboot.
so they seems to be bulti badly.
but oddly my ps2 has worked fine since i got it on lanch.
my dvd rom and dvd rewriter in my pc atm are both sony.
so do they make them badly because they cheap and easy to change in pc's?
i hope the £600 blueray drives are made better
lodore

 

OK, thank you both for the replies ...


stalker

 

With the advancement of technology and the drop in prices needed to penetrate markets of developing countries, more and more manufacturers are shifting manufacturing processes to cheaper parts made in Chinese plants which are often known to have poor quality management and high defect rate. It also helps in market stability so that people keep purchasing drives to keep the corporates in the game.

Basically, that is the biggest problem. Other reasons are poor design implementation (like Samsung's past tray designs) and lower specification power components.