i was wondering on average how many discs does a cd writer burn before it burns itself out!

5 to 10 thousand at least, unless you are unlucky

How long is a piece of string?

Lots of things come into play, make of drive, quality of CDRs burned, whether you use the CDR as a reader, and so on.

Generally I'd say if you want a drive that's going to last get a TEAC or Plextor.

But they're so cheap anyway so given that the LiteOn is half the price of a Plextor just go for a cheap one. LiteOn, Cyberdrive, Artec, they all should last up fairly well.

I used a liteon for about 6-8 months. Sold it and now somebody else is using it fine. They are nice drives and cheap. I figure if you get a year out of a cheapie burner your set. I mean cheap 32x's for $70 can't go wrong.

i dont know what you are talking about. i had a philips 4x burner for like 4 years and it didnt burn out and i burnt discs everyday... at least 10 of them. crappy media, good media. They last forever as long as the drive doesnt end up going bad on its own.

Have a look at the specifications of each burner:

The Liteon 32123S has an MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of 70,000 power on hours with 25% duty (being used).

Thats about 8 years of being constantly powered on and actual burning for 2yrs continually.

I have 2 Lite-on's
my kid has over 2000 BURNS so far on his 24X (he got it X-mas)
and when I asked what he will do when it's shot,
that rotten kid said that he will just switch it with mine

i been burning with my 4x sony drive for 3 years now, its amazing

Originally posted by CHR15
Have a look at the specifications of each burner:

The Liteon 32123S has an MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of 70,000 power on hours with 25% duty (being used).

Thats about 8 years of being constantly powered on and actual burning for 2yrs continually.

The TEAC CD-W540E has an MTBF of over 100,000 hours; however
TEAC doesn't specify the duty cycle they used to arive at the MTBF; although I have seen the quoted duty cycles range between 25 and 30% for most brands.

Most burners will outlast your need for them, since technology is improving so rapidly.

NOTE: The number of burns you can get before a burner dies has gone up considerably. This is because the write speed has gone up, meaning you can burn many more discs than a slower burner, in the same amount of hours...

ive had a 4x hi-val for about 3 years and its good, but the computer sux so sometime the hd starts going crazy and i get a buffer underrun

Well CDR technology pace has slowed down somewhat now. 52X is said to be the peak, so if you were to buy a 52X now, then the chances are the fastest replacement drive will also be a 52X... That is unless they start using multple lasers or something.. I think most manufactures will just move more into the DVD market.

i think drives will get into writing a disc in under 1minute then i think they will give up and move onto dvd.

my 48x liteon does a full 80min in 3minutes so if u think bout it they are nearly there then dvd burners wil ldrop prices and it will be faster buring times with just the same as burning in 1x with dvd. no erros ect...