Mysterious ticking noise

[hunter315]

I know the source of the mysterious ticking, its my optical drive, the question is what is it, is it a sign that it will be dead soon, and will it damage any disks while its dying? If the answer to either of the last two questions is yes, can someone point me to a good review of optical drives? Im curious if there is actually a real difference between my cheapo IDE lite on and a plextor drive.

okay i just did some tests on it, it succeeded in reading the tranformers DVD, battlefield 2142, but failed at reading the fallout trilogy DVD, it just kept going click..click.....click..click......buzzzzzz.....click..click etc, my laptop drive was able to successfully read the fallout trilogy DVD in a few seconds so that atleast confirms the disk isnt bad but it does unfortunately isolate the issue to my desktop

 

[EXT64]

What drive do you have currently?

I don't have an official comparision, but I'll give you my recent experience.

Lite-On: Hit or miss. One was great, one had a horrible vibration issue.
Samsung: 4 and counting great drives.

I know that isn't much help, but maybe if others chime in we can make our own drive review.

 

[hunter315]

This is the drive
http://www0.uk.shopping.com/xPF-Lite-On-Lite-On-DRW-6S160P-05C-DL-Black-Int-16x-DVDRW-OEM

Its got to be atleast 4 years old by now maybe 5, it hasnt given me any trouble until recently but it was in an old pentium 4 until 2 months ago so it definitely wasnt the most troublesome bit in the system before.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

MaximumPC does some crude optical drive reviews. I did the firmware patch mentioned below on my Samsung drive and it actually helped considerably when ripping DVDs.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/dvd_rip_challenge_12_popular_drives_put_test

Here's a couple more. Like I said, they aren't the best reviews.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/plextor_px850sa

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/samsung_shs223

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/Pioneer-DVR-110DBK