Hi
I have a 105 and a 106, well i dont burn much and my 105 has done around 25 dvds and around a dozen cdrs.So all in all its done nowt, well the 105 now refuses to burn CDRs wont have it anyway no matter what media or software.Now i see that this is not uncommon with either DVD or CDR writing going down on these drive.
Im starting to think Pioneer Drives IMO are of low quality.
Ferret

I have to disagree on this one, Yes their have been issues with pioneer drives but mostly down to hacked firmware and ive certainly not heard much drives dying after burning 25 disc's, browse around the forum and you'll notice that 80% of peeps own either a 105 or 106, if they were that bad no one would have them.

I'm with Geobon on this as well. I did have a 105 die on me after 8 months, HOWEVER I was using the drive to rip and write CDs/DVDs and I was using it to play some games and watch movies on almost a nightly basis. That and I had the hacked firmware for it. So I was using it as my only drive and using the hacked firmware. In hind sight it's not very surprising that it died after only 8 months. I have had my replacement for 4 months now and it is just fine. I've had about 60 burns total (CD-R/DVD-R) and no problems. I have kept to the original firmware and added a seperate DVD-ROM drive which is taking quite a bit of wear and tear off of the burner. Also there are always going to be defective models no matter what brand you pick up.

I have had a pioneer 103, 104, and now a 105. I will likely be owning a 107 when available. Each drive was excellent, and none failed. They were only sold because of something new coming along. The only issues I ever had was using the 2X4all firmware on the 104, and replacing it with the official firmware corrected that. Between these drives, I have burned over 600 DVD's, and hundreds of CD's. Only when I tried Optodisc media was there ever a problem with DVD's, and hundreds of Ritek discs later, that is a thing of the past. I would vote for Pioneer drives being high quality, based on my personal experience. I still say it's the hacked firmware that is causing problems, and failures for people. The hardware is not made for doing certain things, and forcing it to is like overclocking a CPU to far. Eventually it's gonna break.

yes m8 there is a quality issue with Pioneer drives , the issue is that they are the best on the market, same as u i have th 105 and 106 and they have between them burned 2000+ discs with not a problem

Good drives, I've had probs using hacked firmware too. Going back to official fixed that.

I do have a Plextor 708 now as well and this is a much superior drive, but a fair bit more dosh involved.

both my dad and me have 106's and we are both using hacked firmware burnt a couple of hundred dvd-rs on both (upto 30 a night on each drive sometimes) and they both work great

don't know if this is relevant but i read somewhere that burning both dvd and cdr on the pioneers or any dual format drives, could lead to probs...

i have only ever burned a couple of cdr's on my dvd drive as i believed the info that i read

a cdr/cdrw drive is only @ £25 - a much cheaper option than a newer 106/107

but i could be wrong .....

Yup, there's some issue with the cdr drive in the Pioneer burner. My Pioneer 105 can still burn CDR and even though it's already burnt, nothing ever showed up. Try burning a music cd, does not play, and no file show up on cd even though it's 687mb used. Odd