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Wait, so you had no problems at all, except for the problems you did have, which apparently work out to something like a 12% failure rate over 6-10 years? That

• hga 13y ago
  No. Right now I have one marginal Sony Optiarc AD-7260S-0B DVD drive bought back in August 2011. By simply not using that drive, e.g. a 2007 Pioneer DVD drive, or a new "Samsung", my media has always read fine. OK, the blanket "I've never had an unrecoverable error" is not true if include "on every drive I've tried them on", but then again this is the only drive that's ever started failing on me before it was replaced in the normal course of events. So my success rate in getting my data back without serious recovery efforts, over 14 years minus 5 months, is 100%. But I should go check some of those oldest disks again, it's been a year or two since I've retrieved stuff from the very early oughts. I don't consider this to be a big thing, given these are commodity consumer drives which will continue to be manufactured to read CDs for the foreseeable future, especially compared to tape, where bad drives are known to eat them and they don't have one old format frozen in time (granted, CD-Rs are less reflective than pressed CDs)....