Arfa Daily wrote:

Based on the amount of these that I see for repair - probably 8-10 a week on
average - I would have to say that they are the most unreliable piece of
consumer technology to come out in the last 30 years. They can be very picky
about what media they work reliably with, and even which make. They suffer
all sorts of software upgrade problems, and the sorts of faults where you
think that the owner is mad or doing something wrong.

couldn't agree more.

(caution -soapbox comes out....)So much for technological 'progress'.
I'm growing to hate optical media in general and dvd-rws especially.
Sad thing is, if the manufacturers had perhaps spent a little more on
critical components and made an effort designing units with decent
airflow, my workshop wouldn't be full of stacks of carcasses of those
things. optical media plus cost cutting nature of today's consumer
electronics= bad news.

I also agree with the 'all or nothing' nature of optical media
mentioned by another poster, making it a poor choice for archiving as
recovery is so hard. Not only that, but even those 'obsolete' tapes
the retailers are telling us must be dumped in favour of this optical
crap seem to survive better - I have cd-rs burned about 6 years ago ,
stored carefully and now unreadable. I have tapes, some even from the
1950s, all of which (barring the acetate based ones) ) play perfectly.
Ok, maybe I was lucky, but to my mind if something such as dvd-rw or
cd-rw is so new and hailed as a technological advance, it should not
fail so often and so soon, as this makes a mockery of the whole
format's claims.

rant off now ;-)
-B.