Hi All, thanks for lookin,

Could you guys with DVD burners give me a little advice, I see lots of pioneers going in the BST but the question "how many burns has it done" always crops up, 250 is considered to be quite a few are they failing after much more than this or do they develope problems? I have a CD Writer thats done thousands of burns, its a plextor 24 speed never missed a beat, was considering a DVD writer but worried on the number of burns it may be capable of, I understand they are under guarantee

:cheers: guys

Well Plextor just released a dual format drive so you do have that option. Honestly I would never buy a used DVD Burner (unless it was like $50 or less) because there are just too many variables: How long has the drive been owned? How many firmware upgrades and what type of firmware has been used (official vs. hacked)? How many burns has this drive done? Were you also using this drive to read, burn cds, ect?
As I said unless you are looking at a REALLY good deal from a trusted seller. BTW I believe if you look around the net you can find that dual format Plextor for about $260.

Thanks for the info jesterrace777, as you say there's lots of possibilities, must admit never thought about the firm ware updates on them, cheers.. As you say you can pick up a new 105 for less than £100 now, and the later one's are dual format +/- R justseems to be lots bein traded on the BST, some peeps have said its due to the prices comin down and the sellin prices on DVD's fallin to £2.50 a disc or less

I have burned well over 200 Princo blanks and about 150 Ritek blanks and they were all at 4x and my Pioneer 105 is still going strong but have to agree, never buy a 2nd hand drive, I bought a 2nd hand Pioneer 104 for XMAS from ebay and it was fine for 3 days then stopped reading and writing any form of cdr.

I have well over 700 burns on my Sony 500a!Still going strong(knock wood)!My 106 has about 100 burns.I never burn more than a couple of dvds in a session.My system is very well cooled,as heat is always an enemy of drives!

Got a Pio 105 here with 50 DVD-R burns, about 10 CD-RW burns, and about 100 CD-R burns. Really still in the "break-in" period but goping strong. :)

as for the other issues ... I would never buy a secondhand burner either and I wouldn't waste my $$$ on dual-format. Go with -R and it'll be compatible with anything you could possibly need it for at this time.

I would totally buy a second hand burner. There is nothing wrong with a drive that has alot of burns. You here people in the forums talking about the laser going bad, I personally think it's a load of BS. Have any of you guys looked at MTBF for any of the drives your are talking about. For the Pioneer 104/A04 its somewhere around 20,000 Hours of use. I mean cmon. Your drive would have to be in CONTINUOUS use for 24 HOURS a day for 3 YEARS!!!! Get real guys.

Really well those specs are of small comfort to all of us who have dead 104s/105s right now after less than a year of use. The fact of the matter is the drive only has a warranty for a year and if it is past that period they aren't going to give you a new drive simply because you haven't gotten 20,000 hours of use out of them. My 105 went dead after only 8 months of use and I am certainly not alone when it comes to 104/105 users. So don't give me that crap about lasers not going bad.

doh now im scared too... My 105 has done about 200 dvd-r burns on princo a grade media (only at 2x). It has version 1.40 firmware (official) ...Doesn't sound like ill get much more out of it though...doh...

I wouldn't be too worried about it. I wasn't trying to scare anyone, I was simply pointing out that sssjk shouldn't assume that every Pioneer burner will last for the 3 year/ 20,000 hour period no matter how many burns/use it was getting. As long as you are using a seperate drive to read and you aren't burning 24-7 you should be fine.

I agree with you Jester, I certainly don't think that "every" drive will work flawlessly all the time...of course you're going to have the bad batches and what not. But back to the question at hand, Just becuase a burner has 600 burns or 100 burns....that has no relation to the drive being bad or not, that's all I'm trying to say. I personally have had my A04 for about a year and half, probably averageing 4 burns a week. That's well into the 300 burn range.

Just my personaly opinion though.

I realise that but as I stated earlier there are a bunch of other things to figure into the equation besides the number of burns a drive has. The other thing to consider is that you don't know if you are going to end up with a defective drive or not but if you buy one new you get the piece of mind of a one year warranty. If you buy one used you do not. Also I haven't noticed that big of a price difference between new and used (at least not enough to make it worth the risk).

I'll agree with that. The prices have fallen to very low levels. You might as well buy new. BUT....If you guys are talking about drives that go bad, wouldnt you want to buy a second hand drive knowing that this drive has produced X amount of burns without a glitch, you also have piece of mind rather than worrying that new burner could die on you soon.

I

My Nec1300A is going strong after 4 burns lol




andyw

my ao5 died after 8 months use,i know at least 4 others who had the same thing happen to there a05's who use them more than me even in shorter period!

same discs that used to work then start failing on ao5 work perfect on a06.

Gotta be laser!

I assume people with drives that died within a year all got a replacement according to the warranty. Right? Anyone knows what Pioneer's saying about all these failed drives?

My five months old A05 is still going strong but I'm only averaging 2-3 burns each week.

yeah comes under warrenty so got a a06 as replacement from svp,i was lucky others got ao5

Man they must've shipped you an A06 by mistake. Errors in your favor are always a good thing. ;)

lol,yeah everyone was moaning after,a friend even sent his back at same time and got a ao5

Well I won't complain about my replacement 105. Mine is a Cendyne and I got it back about 10 days before the out of business announcement came. If my drive had waited 2-3 more weeks before it fell apart I would be SOL.

Thanks for all the input guys, a little clearer, lots to consider.. with the prices coming down a new one looks favourite..

Thanks again

Nuttapper