Did I damage this DVD Drive?

The Tiger

Honorable
Aug 30, 2013
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I had this new ASUS 24D3ST DVD burner for a week, when I inserted an old el-cheapo DVD to copy from. The dye in the DVD was warped and it was taking very long to copy. So I decided to do something else, and completely forgot about it, and went to work. When I returned after about 12 hours, I saw the copying program (Teracopy) still trying to read from the DVD, and stuck at one place. When I ejected the DVD, it wasn't hot at all, but just warm, maybe 3-4 degrees more than ambient temperature.

Now after this incident, the DVD burner burns DVDs properly, but when I try to do quality scans of otherwise scratchless DVDs, this happens all the time:



The quality score is zero all the time with errors at the beginning of the disc. (Although if I slow down the read speed to 8X, the quality scan is much better). This happens for every DVD I insert. The DVDs return 90+ quality score with my Sony drive. I sent the ASUS drive for RMA, but they returned it saying the drive is okay. I can't prove them other than Nero Quality score comparing the two drives, but ASUS says it isn't enough of proof to ask for RMA.

Is the DVD drive really damaged from the 12 hour stress of trying to read the corrupt DVD? It can burn DVDs and read them, until I do a quality scan. Should I dump the drive and get a new one? I need archival reliability of the data I back up.

Please help.