Yamaha CDRW - Is it dead Jim?

[FoxyKaye]

I purchased one of the fancy Yamaha CDRW-F1E drives in an external firewire case at the end of 2002 from OWC. I've actually been using it quite a lot - burning runs of 50-100 CDs almost every other month since I bought it.

Lately, the drive has begun producing write errors, and this morning Toast announced that it couldn't produce a CD copy due to a hardware malfunction, some sort of tracking problem.

I doubt these are signs of a problem with my Firewire bus, since other Firewire devices seem to be working fine.

So, given its heavy use, the kinds of burning errors I seem to be getting, and its age, have I reached the end of life on my Yamaha? To quote Dr. McCoy, "He's dead Jim."

Is it time to get a new one, or could there be another cause for these errors?

 

[stoid]

Sometimes FireWire cables go bad. I ordered a HD, and it wouldn't mount consistently, so I went through the hassle of getting a replacement HD. Still having problems. After a third HD, a friend suggested that it might be the cable I was using. Since the HD shipped with the ridiculously short 9 inch cable, I'd been using one of my own older cables. I switch out to a new cable and had no problems at all.

Check and make sure that it's not a bad cable before you do anything else.

Is the drive you purchased rated for heavy use, or is it a bargain-basement drive? Cheap drives are generally built using flimsy plastic parts that might malfunction after awhile, especially after heavy use.