Ripping killed my Plextor? Options

[Lucien]

I thought this might have been a one off thing - quite some time ago my PX-708 died on me while ripping a CD with EAC. It was long enough ago that I don't remember which CD it was, but I do remember that it seemed to have trouble reading it. At some point I gave up (aborted the ripping) and found that it then would not recognise any disc I put in it, even ones that ripped perfectly fine before.

The drive was in it's last week of warranty, so I managed to send it off for repair, though my local distributor took their time with it. When I got it back it worked for about a week before the same problem hit again.

Luckly I was able to pick up a PX-716 at about the same time. I've mostly kept it in it's original packaging except when I wanted to rip a few discs.

Now about a month ago, I took it back out of it's box to rip a few new CDs after about a year of storage. The first 3 or so went fine, but the next one I put in gave problems. Ripping (again with EAC) was going very slowly, and I figured I'd stop, just on the off chance of damaging the Plextor. None of these CDs had any sort of copy protection on them. I then tried to rip another CD, but the drive wouldn't recognise it at all. After trying another one, I thought I'd retry one of the CDs I'd just successfully ripped... and found that the drive didn't recognise that either.

I switched back to the Samsung SH-S223R that was my day to day optical unit, and it ripped the disk that killed my Plextor without a hitch.

Has anyone had anything like this happen to them before? I've killed two Plextors just by trying to rip a CD. Surely this can't be normal?

Also, is there anything I can do with the Plextor now? It's long since out of warranty, so that isn't an option.

[sshd]

Drives wear down and eventually die. I have ripped thousands of discs and replaced several drives. But it is usually a gradual process. The drive takes longer and longer to recognise the disc and begins to seek like crazy.

I did however one time have a virus that messed with the drive making it unable to rip anything.

[greynol]

This certainly makes a case for ripping in burst mode or C2 + FUA instead of cache flushing since it requires reading only a third as much data.

[Lucien]

Well, I could certainly understand it if I'd ripped thousands of disks, or even hundreds, but it was less than a dozen. Also it went from ripping one disk easily to having no end of trouble with the next. The only thing I can think of is I have terrible luck with Plextors.

Has there ever been some sort of attempt to repair optical drives?