17 Sep
2006
17 Sep
'06
4:48 a.m.
CRC <technobug at comcast.net> wrote:
The basic problem with commercial CD burners/players
is that they
keep the laser diodes on when powered, although at the low power
required for reading. The life of run-of-the-mill laser diodes is on
the order of 10,000 (10.000) hours. Consequently, if you keep your
system on all the time you can expect one to two years of useful life
from the beast (some longer, some shorter).
You know, one to two years is almost exactly what I see for lifetime!
Back in the days of using external SCSI CD-RW's (this is going back
to the mid 90's so on-topic) turning the power to the writer on and off
as needed made sense. But IDE hardware doesn't seem to handle this
nearly so nicely. This pretty much guarantees they'll go bad in a year
or two, I guess. Sucks!
I have several CD burners that have been operating for
over 8 to 10
years (slow...). These are external units to my boxen which are
powered on only when used.
I'm guessing SCSI? My SCSI writers seemed to last a little longer than
my modern IDE ones, but I kept them on almost all the time too.
Tim.