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DVD drive....Bye Bye!

Z

ziloo

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 7, 2006
Messages
990
Location
in the basement
Hello Folks,

My DVD R/W drive has been acting up for a while, and
somehow it works better with newer notebooks than
older laptops ⁉️

I have been told that repair is futile, and I have to get a
new one. Out of curiosity, what is the cause(s) of
DVD drives going down?

ziloo 🖥️
 
The laser could wear out. The logic board could develop a fault. The gears stop moving correctly. Excessive dust accumulation. Some of these causes might be repairable but it could take several hours to diagnose and the replacement parts might cost almost as much as a new drive. Get a new drive and then consider disassembling the drive and trying to track down the fault on some boring day. Maybe you will get lucky and the only problem is a loose solder joint.
 
I've noticed most of the late IDE and newer SATA optical drives don't keep well. Sometimes it's a belt and other times it just needs a cleaning but unless I'm overlooking a cap issue like we are seeing on 80's and 90's optical drives (these are WAY too new to be seeing that kind of a failure, but I've been wrong before) I'm running into a lot of low hour or NOS drives that just don't want to work. There has been suspicion that the lenses on the latest drives are plastic instead of glass and the clouding of the optics might be happening due to age.
 
I think the older drivers that were expensive and were intended on burning massive number of discs were built better then later generation trash drives that sold for $30 new.

Major cause of failure for me are the drive belts (burners, stand alone DVD players, Original XBOX , etc).
 
I had one old DVD-RW from NEC that got laser malfunction and was beyond repair. Currently using some generic under 50$ DVD drive and the case is not working (I mean, I need to open it manually with a screwdriver), but it can read discs. :)

I don't use it often, maybe once every other week.
 
Unknown_K said:
Major cause of failure for me are the drive belts
Click to expand...

Reading all these references to "drive belts" was confusing the heck out of me, because I was pretty firmly under the impression that any remotely modern DVD drive used a direct drive brushless spindle motor... and then I realized you must be talking about the belt in the tray mechanism. :p

(Of course the OP was mentioning laptop drives; maybe the slot-load drives have a belt, I can't say I've taken one apart, but of course the more common "tray" ones don't have belts, it's just a spring and a solenoid that pops the whole thing out.)
 
krebizfan said:
I thought the drive would have had an USB interface since it was used with multiple laptops.
Click to expand...

FWIW, most of the USB DVD drives I have lying around are laptop mechanisms. They fit in laptop bags significantly easier than desktop ones, if nothing else.

Not that it makes a difference with regard to the spindle motor. Even floppy drives got rid of belts by the mid-80’s.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Reading all these references to "drive belts" was confusing the heck out of me, because I was pretty firmly under the impression that any remotely modern DVD drive used a direct drive brushless spindle motor... and then I realized you must be talking about the belt in the tray mechanism. :p

(Of course the OP was mentioning laptop drives; maybe the slot-load drives have a belt, I can't say I've taken one apart, but of course the more common "tray" ones don't have belts, it's just a spring and a solenoid that pops the whole thing out.)
Click to expand...
I was just quoting DVD burner issues in general. Yes, I was talking about the tray belts in full sized drives that fail.

Laptop burners can overheat but mostly they die from over use or dust.
 
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