Bad luck with CD writers

[Guest]

I have an OptiPlex small form factor destkop that I have had since 07 or 08. I ordered it with no CD drive because I wanted to get my own. The first drive I put in was an AOpen (I forget the model number). It was an IDE drive so I had to get a converter because all I had was an ATA slot. This worked fine for about a year. Eventually burning CD's became more prone to failures and eventually did not work at all. It seemed as though the burning process would start but when the laser got to the center of the disk it would stop and start like it was trying to get to the correct spot but could not. So I went ahead and bought a Pioneer ATA DVD writer. It was not as fast as my AOpen but it always seemed to work reliably. Now just recently I have been trying to burn iso images to the CD-R's. The burning process completed successfully and even the data verification completed successfully. However I have noticed that at least one of the files on the CD is unreadable!!!! I noticed this when I tried to copy the entire contents of one drive to a computers disk. I have tried different iso images of similar file size and the same things happen.

I am using Nero 7 ultra edition I believe.

Is there any CD burners not made in China or that you know to be very reliable? Or could there be something else causing this trouble?

 

[buwish]

Have you tried a Liteon? I'm not sure where they are made, but I've found my BD-ROM/DVD-RW combo drive to be excellent, especially when burning (I burn a fair amount of home videos, etc...). It's been going now for well over a year without a hitch. I also have an old DVD-RW drive from a Dell in my machine as well and it hasn't caused me an issue either.

 

[hang-the-9]

Have you tried different media? Buy a few of the good brands and try em out. Could not be an issue with your drive at all. Some drives work better with some disks.

 

[apache_lives]

as much as i hate to say this, iv had the best luck with LG drives for reliability, reading scratched discs etc

Nero 7 also i heard is rubbish - cant confirm

 

[pjmelect]

In my experience Pioneer are good drives but AOpen drives are not so good. Is the drive mounted in the top of the case? The build up of heat at the top of the case can dramatically shorten the life of the laser, consider moving the drive to a lower slot, also the quality of the discs can vary a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from batch to batch, consider burning at a lower speed, I often burn at 4x to get better burn quality.
Nero7 is OK but I prefer Roxio, the recording software shouldn’t make any difference to the quality of the recordings.