Okay, i'll start by just giving a few details about the drive. It can read DVDs at 16x, which means that it can read data 16 times faster than is needed just to play a DVD film and it can read CDs at 48x, 48 times faster than is required to play CDs. The one I had came with my first computer and worked fine, it read CDs and DVDs without any trouble and was even able to read some badly-written CDRs than only CD writers are usually good enough to read. It made the occassional clunky sound, but most DVD drives do. The drive has an IDE interface and an internal audio header for connecting to a sound card. Here comes the horror story though, so settle down with some cocoa and a cookie.
Ever since I bought my computer, it randomly locked up on a regular basis, usually whenever I used it to play games, so I assumed it was just overheating or something and put more fans in. That didn't help, so I thought that maybe the power supply unit that was provided (only 235Watt) probably wasn't powerful enough, so I put in a 400w PSU. It still randomly locked up. In fact it locked up more and more frequently until eventually the PSU died. I replaced the PSU but then about 3 months later, the new PSU exploded, and fried the motherboard at the same time. This sort of thing happened for two and a half years, things in my computer would just randomly break every few months.
The cause of this however completely baffled me - I tried swapping out the suspect components with spares but the problem continued. It wasn't until I had owned the computer for 2.5 years that I found out what the problem was - a power supply had just exploded particularly violently with a big flash and a lot of smoke and my DVD drive broke at the same time. I replaced the PSU and the DVD drive and after that everything worked fine. The computer has not locked up in over a year any nothing else has broken. It seems that the DVD drive was to blame all the time.
In total, the drive destroyed:
2 Motherboards 2 Hard disks (30Gb, 60Gb) 7 Power Supplies 256Mb Memory
These components costed me in excess of £450 to replace - so be warned!
I'm not saying that these drive are neccessarily all bad - I may well have just been unlucky to get a faulty one, but if you get one of these and your computer randomly locks up and destroys PSUs, suspect the DVD drive!
Other than than, the drive worked fine and was perfectly reliable despite being one of the least expensive available.
After discovering that my DVD drive cost me so much time and money, I broke it into little pieces so that nobody can ever attempt to fix it and put it into a different computer. I'm trying to think of a good way to destroy it, maybe i'll string it up somewhere - if you have any ideas please let me know.
More details
Memory / capacity
Good
Design
Satisfactory
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
Speed
Fast
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