hi.

i heard that DVD burners have a limited capacity to burn a number of discs, say 200? after exceeding the limit, a new DVD burner will be required....

any of you know if this is true?

As far as I know, this is false. I have replaced DVD burners that failed after 50, and some that failed after 400 burns. My NEC has burned over 300 discs

so there is indeed a limit to how many a DVD burner can burn right?

it varies according to the brand?

All CD/DVD burners use lasers to melt information "tracks" into metal meterial. These lasers don't last forever under the most favorable circumstances. So yes, there is a limit on how many discs a burner can burn. Who knows what limit that is though...

Most DVD Burners I've seen have a life cycle of 60,000 to 100,000 POH (Power on Hours).

Now that by itself is somewhat worthless because thats just the drive being on but not necessarly doing anything. But I have seen cited a couple places that the POH is cut to 20% with reads, and down to 2% with writes.

So...
12,000 to 20,000 Hours (1.36-2.28 Years) of reading.
1200-2000 Hours (50-83 days) of burning.

If you assume 7 minutes per burn (rough estimate for 16x on a 4.3GB disk) thats 10,285 to 17,143 disks.


Having said all that, I've had 3 die on me in the last 2 years.

so it seems DVD burners cant last very long if you burn frequently..


but does the DVD burner still be able to read DVDs and CDs even after the burn limit is exceeded?

My NEC DVD burner is amost a year old, and I have burned over 300 DVD's and some 50 CD's with it so far... Some burners will still read but not burn. Why worry about this? If a burner won't burn, it is replaced right? The low cost of these burners, make threads like this unnecessary don't you think?