Hi, I was tinking about buying a dvd writer (a 105) of my mate but he has had it for about half a year and burned at least 2-5 disks a day, If i bought it how long do you reckon it would last for? whats the average lifesan for a dvd writer? thanks.

Well as an indication the MTBF (Mean time between failures) for a Plextor CD burner is 10,000 power on hours. That is of those burners that have failed the average amount of time they had been 'switched on' was 10,000 hours. The impact of how many discs the burner had made doesn't form part of the calculation.
Therefor if the PC is on 10 hours a day the average failure rate is after 1,000 days or 3 years.

One thing to note is that this is worked on the number of units that actually fail, so all those burners still going strong after 5+ years don't impact the MTBF calculation.

So the short answer is that a DVD burner can probably be expected to last around 3 years of medium level use.

cool, thanks it looks like I'll buy the burner from my mate then:)

believe it or not, the MTBF rating for most DVD writers is 100,000 POH, which translates to one very long lifespan...